SirionLabs, which provides artificial intelligence technology to companies such as Vodafone, Unilever and Credit Suisse to manage millions of contracts, has raised $44 million in a Series C funding round led by Tiger Global and Avatar Growth Capital. The round brings the valuation of the Gurugram-based company to about $300 million, according to sources.
SirionLabs, an AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform said the new capital would be used to enhance engineering capabilities to fuel technology innovation and grow sales. The company also announced the launch of its new Seattle-based Technology CentrE and the growth of its leadership team. SirionLabs has received the investment at a time when startups are facing a delay or find it challenging to raise funding from investors due to the dwindling economic activity owing to the Covid-19 lockdown in multiple countries.
“The reason why we did a deal today is that after January, the interest in the company really went through the roof. We had reached a certain level of scale and had crossed the $20 million mark in revenue,” said Ajay Agrawal, co-founder, chairman and CEO of SirionLabs. “But much more importantly, I think after Covid hit, there was a flight to quality, and all the major Tier-1 investors started focusing on a smaller group of companies where the growth and growth prospects were very clear,” said Agrawal.
SirionLabs said its approach goes well beyond analog CLM technology (contract authoring and storage) by enabling granular management of performance, invoices and relationships during the post-signature phase. Its key innovations include AI-led contract authoring, automated obligation extraction, real-time service-level computation and predictive invoicing on a ledger architecture to promote true buyer-supplier collaboration and reduce leakage by 5-10 per cent. The Sirion Network hosts contracts in over 40 languages for more than 200 of the world’s largest companies including BP, EY, Fujitsu and Abbvie. The company said it has audited about $40 billion worth of invoices so far and delivered $2.2 billion in savings to the customers.
“With this latest round of funding, we look forward to fast-tracking the execution of our product roadmap and making deep investments in further developing our engineering workforce,” said Kanti Prabha, co-founder and chief operating officer, SirionLabs. “Our success is a reflection of the world-class engineering talent that exists in India and yet another indicator of India’s potential to be a software-as-a-service powerhouse solving complex business problems for global enterprises,” said Prabha.
SirionLabs’ team consists of over 500 employees working across 8 locations in India, the US, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark and Singapore. Complex services represent a multi-trillion global market but contracting and governance continue to be cumbersome manual processes. “SirionLabs has spent several years 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.
Private equity and venture capital investments in India plunged from a high of $2.5 billion in January, to a three-year low of $818 million in March. This made Q1CY20 the weakest quarter for PE and VC investments in the past 12 quarters, with a net $5.1 billion in investments, according to the IVCA-EY’s monthly PE/VC round-up. The precipitous decline in such investments was the result of the severe disruption across markets, caused by dwindling economic activity owing to the lockdown in multiple countries.
Source: Reuters.com