Ironclad, the leading digital contracting platform, today announced it has raised $150 million in Series E financing, bringing total investment to $333 million. Franklin Templeton, a global investment management firm known for backing category-defining leaders like OneTrust and Gong, is leading the round. The 100% insider round also includes previous investors like BOND, YC Continuity, Emergence, Lux, Haystack, Accel, and Sequoia Capital. Ironclad will use the funding to fuel product innovation and scale its digital contracting platform, which is the standard of choice for innovative organizations around the world.
“We’ve been following the digital contracting space for years, and Ironclad is the clear leader,” said Ryan Biggs, Managing Director of Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Venture Partners. “Other players have some components of the solution, but only Ironclad has the whole package. They are leading the field when it comes to vision, product innovation, and team, and we’re excited to partner with them to build the dominant platform for all business-to-business contracting.”
Founded in 2014, Ironclad is the preferred contracting solution for innovators ranging from Fortune 500 companies, like L'Oréal and Mastercard, to industry vanguards like Texas Rangers Baseball Club and Snap. These innovative companies use Ironclad to turn contracts from business blockers to accelerators, and to unlock the data trapped inside contracts into operational insights that power the entire business.
Mastercard, for example, uses Ironclad to free up strategic bandwidth and resources. Mastercard’s VP and Lead Counsel for US Markets, Anushree Bagrodia says, “If we didn’t have Ironclad, we wouldn’t have seen such capacity freeing up for our lawyers and our business.”
And Texas Rangers, a Major League Baseball club, uses Ironclad to unlock contract metadata that has enabled them to stay agile during COVID. “We were able to leverage the dataset that Ironclad provided us to pull all of the individual contracts we had and take a holistic view of what we had signed and what could be impacted by COVID,” explains Katie Morgan, VP of Business Analytics at Texas Rangers. “Frankly, we wouldn’t have survived COVID, but for that,” says Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Texas Rangers, Kellie Fischer.
Unlike other popular contract lifecycle management solutions, Ironclad was built on modern software design principles and is walk-up usable without training, easy to implement, and collaborative. As the only solution on the market with a completely self-service workflow designer and 100% DOCX-native, browser-based editor, Ironclad is uniquely able to meet the needs of remote organizations in our post-COVID world.
Yet Jason Boehmig, CEO and co-founder, says this is just the beginning. “So far, we’ve focused on the core digital contracting experience: the standardized system for business-to-business contracts that connects people to systems and ultimately, data,” he explained. “This next phase of growth will be about expanding that experience into a platform that connects business contracting processes across the organization.”
“Ironclad’s early vision of the digital contracting platform has come to life,” said Ali Rowghani, Managing Partner at YC Continuity. “Their platform approach has already radically transformed contracting for their customers, and will soon transform contracting for all businesses.”
The funding comes on the heels of two important new hires: earlier this year, Leyla Seka joined Ironclad as COO, after two years as a venture capital partner and twelve as a top Salesforce executive, where she built and scaled iconic products including the AppExchange, Desk.com, and Salesforce Mobile. Helen Wang joined Ironclad as CFO, after serving as CFO for eBay Global Payments. “Businesses move as fast as they can contract and Ironclad's digital contracting platform enables companies to use technology to transform how they contract and do business,” said Helen Wang, CFO. “We’ve already built the product, go-to-market, and infrastructure needed to deliver the Ironclad platform to businesses around the world, irrespective of size or industry. Now, with the backing of public market investors like Franklin Templeton, it’s time to really scale.”
Ironclad shares the latest technologies in business contracting at its quarterly State of Digital Contracting (SDC) summit, the only event that brings together leading minds at the intersection of technology and business to prepare professionals for the evolving state of digital contracting. The largest summit of the year is happening in March 2022; subscribe for updates here.