With VC funding in India taking a dive because of coronavirus, fresh investments have become scarce. However, some companies have managed to keep their boats afloat, and even registered growth. SirionLabs with its contract management software is one of those, and has raised $44 million in a Series C round, to expand and handle surge in demand from clients.
The round was led by New York based Tiger Global and Avatar Group, and values the company north of $220 million. The company has raised $66 million till date. Avatar Group has been known to invest heavily in Saas companies in India. However, Tiger Global more recently emerged as a big player in Saas, and has been placing bets left and right in the Indian startup scene.
Ajay Agarwal, co-founder and chairman of SirionLabs, told Economic Times, “The company has seen increased interest from customers for its product amid the ongoing crisis.” However, with the coronavirus pandemic, increased growth does not automatically translates to increased revenue, and Ajay did not mention anything of the sort either.
“Complex services represent a multi-trillion global market but contracting and governance continue to be cumbersome manual processes. SirionLabs has spent several years in developing proprietary AI-enabled performance and invoice reconciliation capabilities to address these inefficiencies head-on,” said Vishal Bakshi, Founder and Managing Partner at Avatar Growth Capital, ET reports.
The startup has seen a 4X growth in the number of customers it has signed up in the last 18 months, TechCrunch reports. Ajay Agrawal, cofounder, chairman and chief executive of the startup said that the capital will be used to address the growth and that the coronavirus has caused companies to become more cautious about the things they promise in their contracts.
He also added that the company has reached its target of $25-million annual recurring revenue (ARR), and is on was on track to double that over the course of the next one year.
The company offers contracts of both types: procurement contract and sales contract. The former is used when an enterprise has to purchase things from a supplier, and the latter when an enterprise has to sell products to a customer. SirionLabs eliminates the hassle of building up a contract, also avoiding the discrepancies that arise due to lack of communication between contract building teams.
“We use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to connect the dots between contracts and what happens after the contract has been signed,” explained Ajay in an interview with TechCrunch.
The company counts enterprises like Credit Suisse, Vodafone, EY, Unilever, Abbvie, BP, and Fujitsu among its customers.
SirionLabs recently opened a new lab in Seattle with about 20 scientists working on a “network version of AI-engine that can operate at scale” Agarwal told ET. Seeing how the company generates 80% of its revenue from US and Europe, the decision does not come as a surprise.
