InCloudCounsel Announces $200 Million Series B Funding from Blackstone Growth (BXG), Rebrands as Ontra
Second round of funding and rebrand underscore legal tech company as leading provider of Contract Automation and Intelligence
San Francisco, October 27, 2021 – InCloudCounsel, the global leader in Contract Automation and Intelligence, today announced it received $200 million in Series B funding in a round led by funds managed by Blackstone, with participation from existing investor, Battery Ventures, and board member, Mike Paulus. Blackstone’s investment was made through Blackstone Growth (BXG), the firm’s growth equity business. Paul Morrissey, a Managing Director at Blackstone, has joined the company’s board of directors as part of the transaction. Past funding includes a $40 million Series A round from Battery Ventures in July of 2019.
In conjunction with its funding news, the company also announced it has rebranded to Ontra—a name derived from the company’s place at the heart of contracts. Ontra represents the company’s mission to make contracts more efficient and to free businesses and lawyers to focus on impactful, engaging work.
Contract Automation and Intelligence
The new round of funding will support Ontra’s focus on leading an emerging category in legal technology: Contract Automation and Intelligence. Contract Automation is the marrying of artificial intelligence and software with a global network of talented lawyers to deliver a complete solution to businesses for high-volume, routine contracts. The result is a high-quality, cost-effective and scalable solution for negotiating and tracking contracts. Contract Intelligence is the transformation of contracts into actionable data and insights, which equips companies to make better decisions and maintain better relationships with business partners and regulators by easily referencing, tracking and reporting on their obligations, and benchmarking against and identifying trends in their contracts.
To date, Ontra has processed over 500,000 contracts and 15,000 NDAs monthly for more than 500 enterprise customers, including many of the world’s leading financial services companies like AllianceBernstein, Warburg Pincus, Houlihan Lokey, Silver Lake and Blackstone itself. Through this funding, Ontra will aim to build on its strong momentum—including significant growth in revenue, customers and headcount—and will support further investments in R&D to help the company execute its innovative and exciting technology roadmap.
“We are proud to expand our partnership with the team at Ontra. As a customer, and now investor, we believe the company is uniquely positioned to play a critical role in transforming the legal industry,” said Morrissey. “Ontra addresses the market’s long-standing need for a comprehensive, tech-driven solution for routine contracting.”
“This significant series B funding round by our long-time customer validates the quality and value of the solutions we deliver to businesses and legal teams around the world,” said Troy Pospisil, Founder and CEO of Ontra. “Blackstone’s investment also reinforces our belief in the value of automating and enhancing contract workflows by combining the best of software, artificial intelligence and a unique labor model. By focusing our efforts on Contract Automation and Intelligence, we will continue to innovate and develop new technologies that revolutionize the way businesses manage contracts and improve the experience of lawyers working on our platform.”
Ontra’s Focus Remains on Transforming Contract Management
Since its founding in 2014, Ontra has worked to solve one of the most persistent problems for law firms and corporate counsel teams: being constrained by high-volume, repetitive routine legal work. Ontra’s human-in-the-loop technology solution streamlines repetitive legal tasks to lower legal costs, accelerate business operations, mitigate risk and free internal resources to focus on more impactful work. At the same time, Ontra also frees its network of top-tier freelance lawyers to grow their practices on their terms with flexible, sophisticated client work.
“We founded InCloudCounsel to modernize the way high-volume, routine contracts are processed—but that was just the beginning,” said Pospisil. “We’re excited to move forward as Ontra, a name that represents our commitment to delivering innovative, efficient solutions for contracts.”
Ontra is committed to developing solutions that streamline even the most complex contracts. In March 2021, the company launched Insight, a SaaS solution that transforms funds documents—such as Limited Partnership Agreements, Side Letters, and Managed Account Agreements—into structured data. Insight delivers a unique set of workflow and reporting tools for asset managers to easily manage their obligations across all funds in one centralized platform. With Insight, fund managers can assign obligations to individuals or functions across their organization, track compliance with obligations in real time and build a comprehensive digital audit trail. While Insight’s initial use case is for funds documents, Ontra will soon expand Insight’s applicability to other document types and industries.
To learn more about Ontra, visit https://www.ontra.ai.
About Ontra
Ontra is the global leader in Contract Automation and Intelligence. The Ontra platform combines the best of artificial intelligence and software with a global network of talented lawyers to offer a complete and scalable solution for recurring legal workflows, such as processing routine contracts and tracking obligations in complex agreements. Ontra delivers purpose-built contract workflow and data management tools to easily manage obligations, answer key questions, and analyze trends and benchmarks. By streamlining repetitive legal processes and transforming contracts into data, Ontra helps customers lower costs, improve quality, reduce turnaround times, and provide actionable insights, ultimately freeing internal resources to focus on impactful and engaging work.
Ontra is headquartered in San Francisco, with global operations across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at https://www.ontra.ai.
About Blackstone
Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our $731 billion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow Blackstone on Twitter @Blackstone.