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Venture Capital News: LinkSquares Secures $14.5M in Series A

2020-02-26
BOSTON, MA, LinkSquares has raised $14.5 million in Series A financing led by Jump Capital.
LinkSquares, provider of the fastest and most comprehensive AI-powered SaaS contract management and analysis tool, today announced it has raised $14.5 million in Series A financing led by Jump Capital. New investor First Ascent Ventures and existing investors MassMutual Ventures and Hyperplane Venture Capital also participated in the round. The company has raised $21.4 million to date, and will use the financing to expand its engineering, sales and product teams, as well as build out its solution portfolio.

With more than half a million contracts under management, LinkSquares helps its hundreds of customers understand and better mitigate risks and liabilities in minutes, not months. With LinkSquares, customers have automatically extracted more than five million unique data points on parties, contract effectiveness date and other key legal terms. Companies such as DraftKings, Fitbit, Twilio, Asurion, VMware and Pendo rely on LinkSquares to elevate their internal value, reputation and productivity by eliminating time spent on manual and ineffective processes so they can protect their companies with confidence.

"LinkSquares is a great example of an enterprise AI use case leveraging advances in natural language processing technology to replace tedious and labor-intensive processes with elegant automation. Its world-class team developed a sophisticated AI-powered tool that is impressively accurate, fast and intuitive," said Saurabh Sharma, partner at Jump Capital. "The potential for LinkSquares is huge, as in-house counsel and operational leaders begin to leverage LinkSquares to address pain points felt across the organization, from M&A to financing, sales and beyond."

By capturing and analyzing every contract created and stored, from inception through a company's evolution, LinkSquares gives legal teams and their constituents full visibility into their contract repository's data, content and liabilities. The company's technology gives midmarket customers a blend of proprietary quality assurance, ready-to-use artificial intelligence and powerful insights across a scalable platform to provide the fastest and most comprehensive post-signature tool on the market today.

"This investment is a testament to the power of our product, incredible growth in 2019, and the innovation of our team. With LinkSquares, customers are tackling universal contract management problems that historically have kept their legal teams buried in countless manual tasks," said Vishal Sunak, CEO of LinkSquares. "With our new and existing venture partners, I'm confident that today's investment will enable us to help even more companies move beyond contract management struggles, and realign their priorities, processes and outcomes."

Supporting quotes:
Katharine Tomko, Partner at First Ascent Ventures, said, "To stay competitive, enterprises are leaning on the speed of the cloud and artificial intelligence to cut through the minutiae. LinkSquares has made it easy for legal teams to simplify the contract management process and harness untapped insights locked away in scanned documents. When in-house counsel breaks free from old constraints with LinkSquares, then sales, finance and the rest of the enterprise wins."

Nicole Ducharme, director of contract negotiations for DataRobot said, "As our company grew from hundreds to thousands of employees, our legal team needed to maintain our contract repository with having to manually rename files, manage document permissions, and other administrative tasks. There were a lot of steps in our previous contract management process, and we were looking for a system to make it as simple as possible. LinkSquares has saved us hundreds of hours by reducing the number of steps we needed to manage our contracts and giving us valuable insights. I use LinkSquares on a daily basis to search for terms and language we've liked, as well as easily run reports to find specific information for new projects, all within a streamlined process."

Beau Sylvester, legal operations lead for Asurion said, "Two years ago, Asurion struggled with document management utilizing more than 25 different locations to store legal documents. After looking at numerous options, we landed on LinkSquares as the best platform for our document management solution. LinkSquares provides an AI powered cloud based solution that takes manual work out of document management. The partnership with LinkSquares has resulted in lowered risk for lost and breached documents, and better efficiency from our staff on search and retrieval of documents using cutting edge technology empowered through LinkSquares. My favorite characteristic of LinkSquares is how intuitive it is for the end user."

Additionally, today LinkSquares announced the expansion of its Smart Values data set. LinkSquares Smart Values, such as "Termination Date" and "Auto Renewal," are defined based on the most important commercial terms in contract management. Smart Values enable organizations to extract contract data, trends and patterns via pretrained algorithms in customized reports in approximately five minutes. With the addition of 20 new Premium Smart Values like "Payment Terms," "Limitation of Liability," and more, LinkSquares customers now have access to a total of 30 critical commercial terms, as well as to full clauses.

Key benefits LinkSquares offers include:

Powerful insights - Know what's in your contracts without having to read them one-by-one with best-in-class AI, OCR, metadata extraction, and proprietary QA process.
Security - Ensure your data is always secure with enterprise-level controls built into each step of the contract management process. LinkSquares is SOC 2 Type II certified by an independent 3rd party auditor.
Speed - Find exactly what you're looking for and create customized reports easily. Get started in weeks, not months with our white-glove onboarding.
About LinkSquares
LinkSquares is a web application tool designed to help legal and finance teams work smarter. The AI-powered contract repository automatically finds and extracts key terms and meta-data from contracts and provides key insights with deep search, custom reporting, and analytics. LinkSquares saves high-growth companies hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars by eliminating manual contract review and the need for outside counsel. For more information, visit https://linksquares.com/.

About Jump Capital
Jump Capital is a thesis-led venture capital firm specializing in series A/B and growth-stage investments ranging from $2 million to $20 million. Jump focuses on data-driven software companies across the FinTech, IT and Data Infrastructure, Enterprise SaaS and Media sectors. Investing with an operating-centric approach, Jump provides advocacy and support for entrepreneurs, complemented with institutional level resources. Visit https://jumpcap.com/ for more information or follow us @jumpcapital.

About First Ascent Ventures
First Ascent Ventures was founded in 2015 and invests in emerging Canadian technology companies that are building the next generation of disruptive, enterprise B2B software that leverages the cloud, big data, analytics, mobility, AI and machine learning. For more information, visit https://www.firstascentventures.com/.
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