Arteria AI Closes $11M Series A Round to Scale its Contract Management Technology
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AI developers have been steadily segmenting the booming financial services technology sector with new tools aimed at automating business processes.
Among the latest examples are fintech startups applying AI to the drafting and analysis of business contracts, a software service known as contract lifecycle management (CLM). A recent entry, Toronto-based Arteria AI Inc., announced an early funding round this week that brought in $11 million. The funds will be used to scale its CLM technology developed by a team of domain experts and data scientists.
Information Venture Partners and Illuminate Financial Management led the Series A round. Golden Ventures and Standup Ventures also chipped in.
Arteria AI was spun out as a standalone business last October by professional services firm Deloitte. Shelby Austin, who developed Deloitte’s CLM software dubbed dTrax, heads the new AI spinoff. Deloitte acquired Austin’s previous CLM firm in 2014.
“We created Arteria to remove the enormous friction in existing contracting processes,” Austin said in announcing the funding round on Monday (March 22).
Arteria AI’s software is designed to help businesses accelerate the drafting of contracts, then analyze executed contracts to glean useable data. The approach is promoted as reaping business insights from what is traditionally considered an enterprise cost center.
The increasingly competitive CLM market is transitioning from contract drafting to leveraging AI for contract negotiations as well as automating the tedious process of reviewing legal documents to determine corporate obligations and entitlements. Machine reading tools such natural language understanding, a subset of natural language processing, are being used to parse documents.
The results include greater accuracy and accelerated contract analysis—as much as 80 percent faster than manual reviews, the startup said.
Arteria’s oversubscribed funding round illustrates how AI-based CLM services are gaining traction as enterprise customers seek to transform a traditional corporate money pit into a means of generating useful data from complex digital contracts.
“Current practices for drafting, negotiating and managing contracts are massively inefficient,” according to Robert Antoniades, co-founder of lead investor Information Venture Partners. Arteria’s technology “harnesses data to generate better information at scale.”
