The round included contributions from Berlin-based Point Nine Capital and London-based Seedcamp.
The LegalTech startup also attracted a series of high profile angel investors to the round, including Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.com and Michael Pennington, co-founder of Gumtree. The funds will be used by Juro to build out its machine learning infrastructure and power its growth.
It is no secret that contracts are painful. In this multi-billion dollar market, e-signing solutions have already taken some of the pain out of contracts. But signing is only one part of the story. Generating, negotiating and managing contracts can all be a hassle and entail manual work and wasted hours. And once you have signed your contract, it is usually just sent to a Dropbox to die.
Through its integrated contracts workflow Juro allows its customers to save 90 per cent of time on contracts through automated contract generation, negotiation, e-signing and management. But what makes it unique is that it is the first contract management tool to use machine learning algorithms to understand the rich data within contracts. Juro actually learns what contracts say.
Initially focused on B2B sales contracts, Juro helps both sales closers and the legal teams that support them do paperwork 10 times better. With AI-level features including negotiation heatmaps and contract analytics, Juro helps customers negotiate better, close sales faster and spend more time doing the work they love. Early customers include several fast-growth marketplace customers, e.g. Deliveroo.
Commenting, Christoph Janz, Partner at Point Nine Capital said: “Almost four years after I wrote on my blog that I’d love to invest in company with an electronic signing element, I’m thrilled we’ve found Juro. We’re extremely excited about Juro’s vision to digitize legal processes end-to-end and apply machine learning to make contract management smarter. As a VC firm we’ve seen our fair share of paper-based contracts, and we’re looking forward to supporting Richard and his team on their journey to bring contract management to the 21st century!“
Reshma Sohoni, Founding Partner at Seedcamp added: “We were hugely impressed when we met Richard and the founding team at Juro and backed their pre-seed round in early 2016. The traction they’ve built over the past year and calibre of businesses they’ve signed up is testament to the fantastic solution they’ve created to tackle the painful, time intensive and costly business of dealing with contracts.”
We’re excited to continue supporting their growth in the LegalTech sector, that’s ripe for disruption, and alongside a group of top tier investors.”
Juro CEO Richard Mabey commented: “Juro is all about redesigning the way that businesses interact with contracts, with technology at its core. Over time, advances in AI are going to transform legal processes. Clearly technology can make contracts more efficient but we say it can make contracts smarter and, dare we say it, even delightful.”
By augmenting contract workflows with machine learning, we are shifting the paradigm in the way legal work is done. We’ve come a long way since the days of Microsoft Word, email and hand signing – and can do much better. Legal teams are increasingly crying out for smarter solutions and we are delivering for them.”
