SpotDraft — a Bengaluru-born legal-tech startup — has just taken a major step toward reshaping how companies handle contracts. In late January 2026, the company secured a $8 million strategic investment from Qualcomm Ventures as an extension of its Series B funding round, doubling its valuation to approximately $380 million. 

This is not just another funding headline — it’s a story about visionary founders, relentless innovation, and a bold mission to make legal workflows smarter, safer, and more autonomous.

From Contract Chaos to AI-Powered Clarity

Founded in 2017 by Shashank Bijapur (CEO) and Madhav Bhagat (CTO), SpotDraft began with a simple yet powerful insight: legal teams spend far too much time on repetitive, manual contract work. 

In most organisations, whether a startup or a global enterprise, contracts are the backbone of business — defining relationships, rights, responsibilities, and risks. But traditional contract management was slow, fragmented, and error-prone. SpotDraft saw this as an opportunity to automate, accelerate, and elevate the entire lifecycle of contracts.

Out of this insight grew an AI-driven Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform that helps in-house legal teams create, review, analyse, negotiate, and execute contracts with unprecedented efficiency and intelligence. 

SpotDraft’s platform is now trusted by hundreds of organisations that demand precision, speed, and compliance — from fast-growing startups to established enterprises.

Why AI, Why Now?

The global enterprise software landscape is being reshaped by artificial intelligence — but most AI solutions still rely on cloud processing. Sending sensitive contracts to the cloud poses real risks: privacy breaches, regulatory issues, and data governance concerns, especially in industries like healthcare, defence, finance, and legal services. 

SpotDraft took a bold alternative route: on-device AI.

Their flagship tool, VerifAI, enables complex contract review — including clause extraction, risk scoring, compliance checks, and edits — to run entirely on the user’s local machine, without transmitting sensitive data to the cloud. This preserves privacy, reduces latency, and fundamentally changes how organisations view secure AI workflows. 

This privacy-first approach resonated with industries that cannot risk exposing confidential terms, intellectual property or pricing models — and it caught the attention of Qualcomm Ventures, a major global investor focused on building the next generation of edge AI. 

The $8 Million Boost: Strategic, Not Simply Financial

The $8 million investment from Qualcomm Ventures is more than capital — it’s strategic validation. The deal follows SpotDraft’s earlier Series B funding of $54 million in 2025, bringing the company’s total funding to around $92 million. 

By backing SpotDraft, Qualcomm is doubling down on the idea that enterprise AI must be privacy-centric, secure, and capable of running at the edge — whether on AI-powered laptops, workstations, or specialised enterprise hardware. 

What makes this partnership noteworthy is how it bridges the worlds of legal software and cutting-edge hardware AI platforms — a fusion rarely seen in the SaaS sector.

Mission, Vision, and the Human Angle

At its heart, SpotDraft is not just building software — it’s rewriting how organisations think about legal processes. Their mission can be distilled into three interconnected goals:

1. Make legal work intelligent and intuitive

By blending AI with deep legal workflows, SpotDraft reduces friction and time wasted on manual edits and reviews.

2. Protect sensitive data with privacy-first architecture

On-device processing ensures that confidential contracts never have to leave a secure computing environment.

3. Enable legal teams to focus on strategy, not admin

Automation liberates human talent for higher-value work — negotiation, counselling, risk strategy, and business growth.

This vision has translated into real business impact: the platform now processes millions of contracts annually, with substantial year-over-year growth in both volume and revenue. 

Where SpotDraft Is Headed Next

With the fresh capital and strategic backing, SpotDraft is poised to accelerate in several key areas:

Deepening AI Capabilities

Advancing VerifAI and other AI models to expand use cases beyond legal — into finance, compliance, and regulated operations.

Global Expansion

Strengthening enterprise presence across the Americas, Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA), and India, tapping into markets hungry for secure AI tools. 

Product Innovation

Introducing workflow automation that integrates more deeply with document ecosystems — from drafting to signature, execution to analysis.

Industry Leadership

SpotDraft aims to set new benchmarks not only in legal tech but in privacy-first enterprise AI, a space gaining urgency as organisations tighten data-sovereignty requirements worldwide.

This next chapter isn’t about incremental growth — it’s about shaping the future architecture of enterprise AI itself.

Why This Matters Beyond Legal Tech

Two broader themes emerge from SpotDraft’s rise:

Privacy First Is the New Enterprise Standard

Organizations are no longer willing to trade privacy for convenience. SpotDraft’s model anticipates this shift ahead of many competitors.

Innovation Knows No Geography

A Bangalore-based startup influencing how global enterprises process their most sensitive documents reflects the new reality of global Indian tech leadership — from SaaS to AI and beyond.

Finally, SpotDraft is a STORY for Every Upcoming AI Startup to Learn From

In an era where AI is often synonymous with cloud computing, SpotDraft’s on-device breakthrough is a rare and powerful deviation. It challenges assumptions about where intelligence lives — not in remote servers, but closer to the data that matters most: right on users’ machines.

Their journey, from a contract automation idea to becoming a $380 million-valued pioneer in privacy-centric enterprise AI, is a testament to the power of thoughtful innovation that respects both human workflows and human trust.

As the startup expands its impact globally, SpotDraft’s story is not just about technology. It’s about responsibility, vision, and reshaping the foundation of work for a connected, digital, and privacy-hungry world.