Today, Lexion announced a $4.2 million Series Seed funding round led by Madrona, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
The business world is filled with and ruled by an ever-increasing mix of complex documents that need to be constantly managed – from customer and vendor contracts to insurance agreements to commercial real estate agreements. Exactly how and when “business gets done” is determined by the key details in these documents, and yet the process for tracking and acting upon these details is often highly manual, time consuming, and inconsistent. This is where the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) come in.
Enter Lexion, a new offering for underserved mid-market businesses that provides a powerful application, based on AI and NLP technology developed at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), built from the ground-up to ingest and understand your corporate contracts. Whether it be a pricing term, a partnership revenue share agreement, a renewal date, or an extension clause, the details are tedious to find and track and yet necessary to understand and be able to act on in order to run a business well. Lexion is your powerful magnet for locating that “needle hidden in the haystack” of your paperwork, and it helps make you smarter, faster, and more action-oriented when running your business.
Gaurav Oberoi, Lexion founder and CEO, is a Seattle-based entrepreneur whom we have known and have wanted to work with for a long time. He is a tremendous founder and well-known in the tech community both for his successes in and his enthusiasm for the Seattle startup scene. He founded and bootstrapped successful startups Billmonk (acquired by Obopay) and Precision Polling (acquired by SurveyMonkey) and originated the still popular startup email list, STS (SeattleTechStartups), over a decade ago. Gaurav, together with co-founders Emad Elwany and James Baird, came together at AI2 and formed the idea for Lexion over discussions on the common customer problem of intelligent document management and then built Lexion as a solution to solve it.
At Madrona, we love this customer- and problem-first approach to company creation and are excited to support the Lexion team from Day One. This investment also supports one of our core investment themes of ML-driven intelligent applications, in this case using advanced text mining and NLP techniques to extract structured data and insights from large corpuses of unstructured information to solve a vertical business problem, here specifically contract management. We think there will continue to be more opportunities in this form of entity extraction from large text sets, and this investment builds on the theme behind our other startup in this space, Lattice Data (acquired).
In talking to dozens of portfolio and other midmarket and growth companies, we heard this pain point and market opportunity reiterated over and over again. We were enthused as this company and technology came together to solve the problem, and are very excited to also have forward-thinking law firm, Wilson Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati, the premier legal advisor to technology, life sciences, and growth enterprises worldwide, invest a sizable amount and join the board. WSGR clearly sees their clients dealing with this same issue of contract management and understands deeply the differentiated approach Lexion is bringing to market. We are looking forward to working with David Wang at WSGR and the team there to help build Lexion’s success.
Lexion is also the latest company to spin out from AI2 and the third we have funded (previous early stage investments were Kitt.ai and Xnor.ai). AI2 has proven to be an incredible incubation ground for companies – and it’s great to see Seattle and our region nurturing AI for the broader good.
To learn more about intelligently and cost-effectively managing your contracts – visit https://lexion.ai/