For years, the software that companies use to draft, sign, and store contracts was legal tech’s center of gravity. Then ChatGPT arrived.
Budgets and attention snapped to agents and copilots, and legal pundits started declaring the contract software category a ticking time bomb.
Ironclad, one of the contract-lifecycle management (CLM) companies that rode the boom, says the obituary is premature.
The company told Business Insider it has crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $150 million last May, and its customers include OpenAI, Salesforce, L’Oreal, and Mastercard. Founded in 2014, Ironclad has raised $333 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Bond.
“I mean, not surprisingly, we’re pretty bullish on CLM,” Ironclad CEO Daniel Springer said on a call.
He’s swaggering in a moment when the category is routinely declared dead. Springer bet his career on it. Early last year, he was a free agent, having stepped down as CEO of Docusign in 2022. He said he spoke to 40 companies before taking the Ironclad job in April. Since then, Springer’s been recruiting heavily, pulling in chief technology officer Sunita Verma, who spent 17 years at Google, and longtime Microsoft engineer Herman Man as Ironclad’s new chief product officer.
Springer said he’s heard the “CLM is dead” debate so many times that he compares it to the endless calls for email’s demise. Ironclad’s view is that the need for companies to contract with each other isn’t going away. What is changing, Verma told Business Insider, is how the work gets done: away from rigid workflow software and toward agentic systems that can do chunks of work on their own.
That shift has turned contract lifecycle management into a high-stakes catch-up game. The same platforms that once won clients by organizing contracts now have to show they can automate what legal teams do inside them. In November, Ironclad released a fleet of virtual assistants that it said can handle tasks such as intake, negotiation, and extracting information buried in contracts. Springer said a third of recent new customers also bought its agentic add-on, Jurist.
In that world, Ironclad isn’t just competing with other CLM vendors like Agiloft and Sirion. It’s facing a swarm of startups built on large language models, including Ivo and Spellbook, that promise to handle pieces of contract review. Even the foundational model makers are moving closer to legal workflows. OpenAI has publicly written about building a contract review tool for its own teams. More recently, Anthropic rolled out a legal plug-in that it says can speed up in-house tasks.
Ironclad eyes dealmaking
Springer said Ironclad is open to doing deals this year as it tries to capture more of the market. Some close competitors are for sale, he said, and he’s looked and passed. He added that he isn’t eager to buy another CLM platform, arguing that many older products “aren’t the platforms of the future.”
Instead, he said Ironclad would consider acquisitions that bring a crack team in-house, especially technical talent building something original that might struggle to break into large enterprise accounts on its own. Industry watchers expect more consolidation this year as buyers tire of single-use tools, and more founders start looking for distribution (or a soft landing) inside larger platforms.
Even so, Springer doesn’t think the CLM category is done spawning new entrants. He expects founders will keep building contract software — even if they try to dress it up in new language for the AI era.
“Maybe they won’t call themselves CLM,” he said. “But I will bet you dollars to doughnuts they will call themselves CLM, because that’s what the customer knows.”
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