Harbour, the contract management startup, has recently secured $15 million in a Series A funding round. This latest investment brings the total funds raised by Harbour to $20 million. Notable investors in this round include Jonathan Klein, co-founder of Getty Images, as well as Scribble Ventures and The Palmer Company.
Key Takeaway
Harbour has raised
5 million in a recent funding round, bringing the total raised funds to $20 million. The contract management startup plans to use the investment to expand its team and scale its sales efforts. Harbour aims to revolutionize contract drafting and management, providing a platform that combines automation and human expertise. With a strong customer base and significant revenue growth, the company is well-positioned to navigate the competitive contract lifecycle management landscape.
Scaling Growth and Enhancing Operations
The raised funds will be primarily used to expand Harbour’s team and support its sales and go-to-market efforts. Additionally, the investment will contribute to further engineering and product development. As the company continues to scale, Harbour aims to make contract drafting and management more streamlined and efficient.
“The biggest challenge the digital contracting industry will face is continuing to strike the right balance between automation and augmentation as AI becomes a stronger force across all markets,” stated Josh Elkes, co-founder and CEO of Harbour.
Harbour’s objective is to augment business processes rather than replace them entirely. The platform has been designed to seamlessly integrate with other systems, allowing contracts to move through an enterprise from draft to execution effortlessly.
Founders’ Expertise in Content Licensing and Analytics
Harbour was founded in 2019 by Josh Elkes and Eric Doversberger. Elkes, with his extensive experience in content licensing at Downtown Music and Getty Images, had envisioned building an automation platform for creating business contracts. Doversberger, who spent over a decade on Google’s people analytics team, shared Elkes’ passion for optimizing legal back-office workflows.
“Every time a business uses an image, video, or song, it requires one or many contracts,” Elkes explained. “As the creator economy rapidly expanded, businesses were looking to work directly with a growing number of creators, but contracting software wasn’t keeping pace with the speed, volume, and level of collaboration businesses needed to transact.”
The Power of the Harbour Platform
Harbour serves as a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, offering various modules that simplify different aspects of contract writing, modification, and signing processes. The platform provides features such as collaborative contract editing, version control, contract templates, e-signature integration, and real-time editing tools.
What sets Harbour apart is its ability to automatically trigger actions such as background checks and updating customer relationship management records. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), the platform can extract valuable company information from documents, identify key clauses, send alerts, and identify discrepancies in contractual language that may require additional review.
It’s worth noting that the AI-powered autonomous writing and updating of contractual language still requires human approval to ensure accuracy and compliance.
Harbour can be seamlessly embedded on any website, allowing businesses to create legal workflows that match their aesthetics. Agreements can be easily shared through personalized email links, reducing the need for multiple individual emails to sign contracts.
Impressive Growth and Strong Customer Base
Although Harbour’s exact revenue figures remain undisclosed, CEO Josh Elkes revealed that the business has experienced triple annual growth and now surpasses $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
The company boasts over 2,000 customers, including major entertainment companies and government municipalities. Harbour has partnered with renowned names such as Paramount, Lincoln Center, and Smartshift to facilitate contracting agreements, tax forms, and background checks.
A Competitive Landscape
While Harbour faces competition in the contract lifecycle management space, with larger players like SirionLabs and Icertis, the company remains confident in its ability to outperform competitors.
“Since Harbour’s earliest days, it has run a highly efficient business and kept a ‘cash-flow positive’ approach in sight,” said Elkes. “Investing in growth at this stage is a strategic decision, considering the size of the market opportunity and the optimal timing to bring a next-generation contract management platform to the market.”
