Lexion gained a foothold by using artificial intelligence to help legal departments manage contracts. But now it’s taking aim at a much larger vision.
The Seattle startup just raised $20 million to bolster its AI-powered software that speeds up how deals get done.
Founded in 2018, Lexion initially pitched its product as a smart repository for contracts, giving legal teams a way to quickly answer basic questions about existing documents.
But the startup soon realized it could also add value during the contract creation process — helping not just legal but also sales, IT, finance, HR, and anyone dealing with contracts or documents such as RFPs and questionnaires.
“That strategy worked really well for us,” said Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi.
Lexion tripled revenue in 2022 and now investors are throwing more fuel on its fire.
Point72’s venture capital arm, which recently set up a Seattle outpost, led the Series B round, which was first reported by GeekWire.
Citi Ventures, the venture arm of finance giant Citi, also participated, a nod to Lexion’s potential value-add beyond legal use cases.
Existing backers Khosla Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and Wilson Sonsini also invested.
Venture capitalists are pouring money into AI startups amid growing hype in the sector as tools such as ChatGPT attract attention and incumbents like Microsoft and Google race to develop their own AI-infused products.
Lexion has established itself as a leader in the legal tech and contract management sectors, which includes competitors such as Seattle-area unicorn Icertis and incumbents including DocuSign. The company spun out of Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2018.
“As they broaden their scope to include other operational workflows, we expect them to bring the same level of product expertise and innovation to new use cases,” Sri Chandrasekar, managing partner at Point72 Ventures, told GeekWire.
Lexion gives companies a way to keep all their contracts in one place, with the aim to improve visibility and collaboration. It’s now a “workflow platform for operations teams,” Oberoi said.
Joe Collis, director of legal at Lacework, is a longtime user of Lexion.
“You’re not having different spreadsheets and different systems,” he said. “It’s a one-stop shop to know where a deal is.”
The software integrates with existing tools such as Salesforce and Microsoft Word. Last year Lexion rolled out new GPT features for its Word plug-in, including the ability to suggest potential edits and write entire text summaries.
Oberoi thinks the company will be able to reduce the amount of time that lawyers spend reviewing contracts by 80%.
“Technology is now finally at the place where we can emulate the role of a junior attorney on your team incredibly well,” he said.
Oberoi doesn’t see technologies such as GPT as an immediate existential threat to lawyers. But he does see “some shrinkage in what they’re doing.”
“As we’ve often seen in a lot of industries, wages for people who are in those jobs actually end up going up because they’re doing higher value tasks, and lower value ones are automated,” he said.
Oberoi co-founded Lexion with Emad Elwany and James Baird and previously helped build BillMonk, a bill-splitting app that predated Splitwise. He also created Precision Polling, an automated survey startup that was later purchased by SurveyMonkey. Elwany previously worked as an engineer at Microsoft on artificial intelligence and Baird is an engineer who came from web development firm Pancake Labs.
Lexion, a finalist for Startup of the Year at next month’s GeekWire Awards, employs around 60 people. Total funding to date is more than $35 million.
