Today, the AI-infused Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform is used by companies like Airbus, Cognizant, Daimler, Microsoft and Sanofi to manage 6.5 million contracts with a contract value of more than $1 trillion in 40+ languages across 90+ countries. The ICM platform transforms contracts into strategic business assets, giving global enterprises powerful new capabilities to maximize revenue, control costs, and manage risk. Icertis serves five of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies by market capitalisation and five of the top seven pharmaceuticals companies in the world.
The commercial relationships of every company are governed by contracts. Historically, contracts were viewed as static documents, stuffed into file cabinets or online repositories, and not strategic business assets. Icertis’ cloud-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) system changed that, helping increase productivity, improve accuracy and safeguard contractual relationships across the business world.
In 2015, Eight Roads became the first institutional investor in Icertis with an investment of $3m in their Series A. Over the years we doubled down on our conviction by participating super pro-rata across multiple rounds. On 17 July 2019, Icertis announced its Series E round of $115million, making it the first CLM company in the world to be valued at north of a billion dollars.
Recognised by industry experts, Icertis was named a leader in the 2019 Forrester report, The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), 2019 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, 2019 Forbes AI 50, 2019 Forbes Cloud 100 and G2 Enterprise CLM Leader.
Top themes:
Spotting a market opportunity - Every company has multiple commercial relationships and to manage them effectively, there are contracts in place. As the size of the company increases so does its commercial networks and as a result, the number of contracts it needs to manage. The need to digitise the management of commercial relationships is becoming even more urgent to both accelerate performance and protect against risk. Digitising the process and managing the contract management lifecycle in the cloud was an opportunity Icertis spotted and grabbed, at a time when no one else was looking at it. In 2015, the SaaS and Enterprise Software market for CLM was c. $500m and today it has grown to c. $20b. In just four years, a sector that was relatively undiscovered has grown exponentially. It’s this market opportunity that Icertis spotted and decided to pursue relentlessly.
Single-minded focus - The solution the company decided to go ahead with was a cloud-based contract management solution. The team spotted a large, untapped market waiting to be disrupted. From then on, Icertis dropped all other lines, and focused all its efforts to succeed and dominate this untapped market.
Belief in the vision - It can be daunting to go after a belief when no one else around seems to get it. But to Samir and Monish that is where success lay; they identified a gap in the market and set out to find a solution that would revolutionise the way organisations manage their contracts. When the Eight Roads Ventures team first met the founders, what stood out was their sheer unwavering belief in the vision and the product. The market was small, the players unlimited but here were two founders who knew their company would win.
Culture - What sets Icertis apart from other players in the market is its strong value driven culture which has contributed to its success. Icertis’ commitment to its values captured in the acronym “FORTE” – fairness, openness, respect, teamwork, execution – resonates throughout the company and is strongly embraced by every member of the team. In 2018, Icertis was named by the Seattle Business Magazine as a Top 100 Company to Work For and the 2nd Best Midsize Company to Work for in Washington State. The company’s culture is truly the number one differentiator and the award validates the efforts made to build a strong value driven business.
Hire the best and reward them well - A key to Icertis’ success has been a strong team who have executed well. Their biggest strength is people. In the initial days, the team was small with just Samir, Monish and a few colleagues. Today, Icertis has a strong, driven team of over 900 people globally. The founders have always believed that if you hire the best and reward them well, the results will follow. And today the company’s results speak for itself. Icertis has one of the largest ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) pools in the industry. It’s this symbiotic relationship between performance and reward that underpins the company’s success.