SirionLabs is a platform for enterprises in industries such as energy, financial services, IT and healthcare, and telecom. They have announced Series D funding to enable the company to continue expanding its leadership position in the rapidly growing enterprise CLM market. SirionLabs connects data from contracts through all commercial processes to shine a light on areas to improve efficiencies and minimize risk.
In a recent chat with Ajay Agarwal, the co-founder and CEO of SirionLabs talks about how contract automation is changing the way we do business and why this is important for enterprises to achieve considerable improvements over their business processes, and reduce risk, increase revenue and SirionLabs' growth plans in India.
He shares his expertise on how AI plays a major role in their functioning and AI Changing the Contract Analytics Game. Also, he speaks about the growth plans he has for India.
Introduction to SirionLabs - (A brief non-promotional profile)
SirionLabs is a provider of contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, which includes the management of contracts efficiently across an enterprise – meaning everything from contract creation, repository, managing contract obligations, etc. SirionLabs connects data from contracts through all commercial processes to shine a light on areas to improve efficiencies and minimize risk. This empowers businesses to easily manage the complete contract lifecycle while also extending to adjacent commercial processes, putting contracts at the core of all commercial activity.
What are the services that SirionLabs provides?
Contract management is one of the fastest-growing spaces in the software industry. Today, digital contracts and workflow automation remain top priorities, especially with many enterprises operating with a remote or hybrid workforce. SirionLabs’ end-to-end CLM platform, SirionOne, provides enterprises with the tools to digitize, stay connected and create efficiencies across IT, sales, legal, procurement, finance, and more.
SirionOne speeds up time-to-contract and standardises legal and contracting processes across a company. For sales departments, contract intelligence can be leveraged to quickly generate sales contacts, strengthen negotiations, reduce risks, and complete deals faster. Additionally, procurement managers can unlock insights after migrating supplier contracts that were in silos by digitising and storing them in a centralised repository. This creates smarter contracts and accelerates supplier onboarding. For finance professionals, especially CFOs, the ability to integrate contracting performance, invoicing processes, and intelligence extracted from existing agreements adds new levels of accuracy for improved financial health.
How did the company come into existence?
Back in 2006, after I started my first company, a legal process outsourcing company called UnitedLex Corporation, I became privy to the difficulties and challenges companies face in trying to keep up with their labor-intensive contract management processes. This spurred the idea to create a solution for the large-scale automation of contracts. In 2012, I got together with Claude Marais, the former global head of outsourcing at General Motors, to deliberate and
conceptualise this approach and we founded SirionLabs – an enterprise SaaS platform for contract management software – with our co-founders Kanti Prabha and Aditya Gupta.
Tell us about your business model.
As a deeply customer-centric business, we have traditionally sold directly to customers. Our relationships with customers give us the insights we need to further develop SirionLabs’ platform, and now we look at them more like co-creators of our product. While we are committed to working directly with customers, we’re also building strong partnerships and alliances comprised of Big Four consulting firms, system integrators, and resellers. Our partners provide a great deal of value to customers in the form of industry and domain expertise and are also a massive force multiplier when it comes to rolling out our product across the market at scale.
Growth priorities for 2022 and beyond in India.
After our recent USD 85 million Series D funding success, we are now able to scale our operations in India, with full focus on attracting new customers and serving our current customers. Key areas such as AI innovation, contract performance management, and user experience will be our core focus to continue our acceleration in India and across the globe.
We plan to expand our footprint at current offices in Gurgaon, Pune, and Bangalore and in our key markets across the world. As part of this expansion plan, over the next 12 months, we intend to recruit more than 200 new employees, particular talents that can drive our data science, engineering, and customer success.
What sets you apart from your competitors?
One of the key differentiators of the SirionOne platform is its deep AI capabilities that address some of the thornier difficulties in CLM. Built on a foundation that combines machine learning and natural language processing, and trained on a vast array of documents and industry data, the system yields huge time and resource savings in areas like importing and organizing legacy contracts, negotiations and contract review. SirionLabs’ approach goes well beyond standard CLM technology by providing visibility into contract performance, invoices, and relationships during the post-signature phase, and leveraging those insights to inform future contracts.
How is contract automation changing the way we do business? A few key benefits for enterprises.
Without contractual agreements, there would be no commercial activity. For such an essential process, legacy contracting processes are remarkably laborious. Automation offers a number of key benefits across the organization:
- For legal professionals, it dramatically reduces time-to-contract, risk, and contract review time. SirionOne's AI-led capabilities, along with a standardized contracting playbook, template, and clause libraries reduce draft generation time by up to 90%. In addition, risk discovery and automated risk mitigation controls offer compelling value.
- For Sales professionals, it reduces contract cycle time and revenue leakage. SirionOne helps significantly reduce quote-to-contract time through self-service contract creation and AI-guided legal review capabilities. In addition, SirionOne also helps capture post signature performance data, which can be used to lead account growth conversations.
- For Procurement professionals, the benefits are around negotiation, minimizing costs, and more efficient supplier management. For this, the platform offers front-line self-service contracting capabilities and the ability to automatically link third-party risk, performance/delivery, and invoice data to contracts. This provides the opportunity to realize hard savings to the tune of 6-12% at the invoice level.
- For finance professionals, the advantage is visibility into expenses and revenues. For them, SirionOne offers 360-degree visibility into contracts and embedded terms that are likely to have a direct impact on cash flow and revenue. In addition, the platform’s deep BI capabilities can be leveraged to track trends such as DSO, payments/invoicing value, spend, and use past spend/revenue data to develop accurate spend budgets/revenue forecasts
- For IT professionals integrations with the existing systems offer a single source of truth for the company’s most important data. SirionOne offers a series of prebuilt integrations adapters and APIs to easily interface with a wide array of enterprise IT systems such as ITSMs, ERPs, P2Ps, CRMs, and more.