Ali Hasan
Confused with Reading Contracts? Call Icertis.
Introduction – Icertis is an enterprise contract management platform in the cloud that solves hard contract management problems on an easy-to-use platform.
With Icertis, companies can accelerate business by increasing contract velocity, protect against risk by ensuring regulatory and policy compliance and optimize the commercial relationships by maximizing revenue and reducing costs.
The AI-infused Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform is used by companies like 3M, Airbus, Cognizant, Daimler, Microsoft, and Roche to manage 5.7 million contracts in 40+ languages across 90+ countries.
Icertis was founded in 2009 by Monish Darda & Samir Bodas and is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, USA with 12 offices globally, including an engineering office in Pune, India, new offices in Singapore and Sydney, and 3 support centers, with the most recent one opened in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Icertis has a 500-member R&D team in Pune. It also employs another 200 members in the US. With unmatched technology and category-defining innovation, Icertis pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with CLM.
The AI-powered, analyst-validated Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform turns contracts from static documents into strategic advantage by structuring and connecting the critical contract information that defines how an organization runs.
Today, the world’s most iconic brands and disruptive innovators trust Icertis.
Early Days – During a morning walk in April 2014, Samir and his friend Pradeep Singh, the founder of Aditi Technologies, were talking about Icertis, then in its fourth year.
The company was generating a couple of million dollars in revenue and was bootstrapped with an investment of a million dollars. Samir told his friend that Icertis was doing well, and offered four cloud-based products.
Pradeep was particularly interested in the potential of one of them – a cloud-based contract management solution, a domain that had for years been dominated by SAP and Microsoft. Pradeep suggested the founders focus solely on contract management, and looked at raising money as it was a highly valued business and product.
“At that moment we and the team began to focus only on that, and worked to scale up fast,” recalls Samir, who was CEO of Aztec Soft (acquired by MindTree) before starting up Icertis in 2009. His co-founder, Monish, had earlier set up WebSym and worked in BMC Software. Both founders, in their early fifties now, recall that the single-minded focus helped them scale from a small company.
Marketing Strategy – Icertis has many products and services but they market themselves as a company which handles business contracts and see them as the foundation of commerce.
They convert contracts into strategic advantage. They have a bold vision to fully analyze the contents of every contract which will eventually help you and your business.
User Base & Valuation – Icertis customers include Apple, BestBuy, Hanes, Johnson & Johnson, Google, and Microsoft. Icertis estimates the total addressable market at $20 billion, growing at 35% year-over-year.
Icertis has raised a new $80 million investment round, pushing its valuation to $2.8 billion, up from $1.1 billion in 2019.
Funding – Icertis has raised a total of $291 million in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 11, 2021 from a Series F round. Icertis is funded by a total of 10 investors. Greycroft and PSP Growth are the most recent investors.
Some of their other investors are as follows:-
- B Capital
- PremjiInvest
- Ignition Partners
- Meritech Capital Partners
- Eight Roads Ventures
Revenues – With revenues of more than $100 million, Icertis says it is looking to continue with its three-digit growth rate in the foreseeable future. “The total addressable market size globally is around $20 billion and growing at around 35% year over year.
It’s a fast-growing market and we’re growing much faster,” says CEO Samir Bodas. While the company is the third Indian software products company to become a Unicorn, firms like it are still a minority in the ever-growing list of local private companies valued at over $1 billion.
Experts say that India will certainly produce more Unicorns in the SaaS space, but B2C firms will continue to top the valuation charts, largely owing to the way software product companies function. With the ability to sustain capital-efficient growth, SaaS companies are less likely to raise large amounts of capital which lend them huge valuations.
Acquisitions – Icertis hasn’t acquired any startup but they have been in a partnership with Microsoft. In 2016, they announced that a stronger partnership with Microsoft will offers a deep integration between Icertis’ own platform and Microsoft Dynamics.
The integration covers Dynamics CRM Online as well as Dynamics AX. Utilizing the partnership, joint customers of Icertis and Microsoft will be able to automate many of their processes in order to make the process from sales lead to cash receipt ever easier.
The partnership came at an interesting time for Microsoft. Its Dynamics CRM solutions had been seen as lagging behind Salesforce in terms of being leading-edge and cloud-first tools.
Controversy – Icertis haven’t been involved in any controversy as of now.
Present Time & Future Goals – In the first half of 2021, the company delivered multiple advancements to its core platform that make contract data and insights more accessible and greatly speed contract authoring and completion. Newly released solutions and ICI features include:-
- AI Studio – This powerful new self-service solution enables ICI administrators to create customized AI models and train them to identify patterns, discover hidden insights, and recommend actions.
- Co-Authoring in MS Word Online – Through its deep partnership with Microsoft, Icertis now enables ICI users to jointly edit contracts and collaborate in real-time within Microsoft Word Online, delivering radical operational efficiency for contract owners.
- ICI Flexible Signature – The Icertis e-signature integration for DocuSign and Adobe now allows parallel signatures so that multiple signatories can sign an agreement simultaneously, reducing contract turnaround time. It introduces a hybrid signature process option for using manual and electronic signature modes in a single transaction. Users can use multiple electronic signature providers within the platform and select which signature provider to use at the agreement level.
With the largest R&D organization in the CLM sector, Icertis has also invested significantly this year to develop Icertis Contract Intelligence for vertical sectors, as well as a series of business applications, to be rolled out throughout the 2nd half of the year.
Conclusion – The high cost of deploying on-premise contract lifecycle management is one of the major challenges for Small and Medium Enterprises.
The price of the contract lifecycle management includes the cost of software licensing, system design and customization, implementation, training, and maintenance. Icertis, which is solving this problem, is now a top IT vendor and competes with SAP, Apptus, and CLM Matrix.
Since it is hosted on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft is helping this young company with a go-to-market strategy. So far the future looks quite bright for the company and they have shown that their business model is not only working but also necessary for many businesses for their survival.
But the big question is how will they make money? The business model of the company is based on an annual subscription model. It earns on the total number of contracts drawn up and tracked. The India market provides 10 percent of the company’s revenues.
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