Manchester-based digital contract management platform Summize has secured £5m Series A investment from YFM Equity Partners and Maven Capital Partners.
Founded in 2018, Summize has experienced rapid growth by taking a disruptive approach to a traditional sector. Its world-first integrated contract lifecycle management software is designed to make contract workflows smarter and up to 85 per cent faster by digitising and automating manual legal processes. The technology integrates into the daily life of businesses via established platforms including Teams and Slack, improving collaboration between in-house legal and business users.
Summize has more than 100 businesses worldwide on its platform, including Fujifilm, Everton FC, NCC Group, Moonpig and The Modern Milkman.
The funding has been raised through YFM’s British Smaller Companies VCT and Maven. The business will expand into key overseas territories, specifically the US, in addition to supercharging product innovation, sales and marketing, with its new cashflow.
Tom Dunlop, co-founder and CEO at Summize, said: “Summize aims to drive greater value from business contracts by speeding up and automating the end-to-end process, from creating a contract through to analytics and summaries. Unlike many of our competitors, our system integrates directly with existing collaboration tools, which is vital for adoption across the business.
“The Series A funding will enable us to build out our sales and marketing capabilities and accelerate expansion with a presence in the US, which is a huge potential market for us. We will also continue scaling what we have already built with further product development and innovation – we have a clearly defined target market and products with the functionality to meet a very real business need.”
Mike Clarke, investment partner at YFM, added: “Summize are deliberately different and we like their disruptive approach. They have developed a really effective solution to helping drive legal departments and processes on the digital journey, and one which is attractive to users as it operates as an extension of existing ways of working. The efficiency benefits are quickly apparent to clients with estimates that users of the platform save 85 per cent in time spent reviewing contracts.”
James Darlington, Investment Director at Maven, said: “Maven is delighted to be backing Summize. It is an attractive opportunity for the Maven VCTs to invest in a rapidly growing business which has made strong commercial progress in terms of sales growth and new customer wins. We have been impressed with the ambition, skill and knowledge of the management team and we are confident they will continue to drive the business forward and deliver on their growth ambitions.”
Summize was founded in 2018 by former general counsel Tom Dunlop and software engineer David Smith to address the pressing need make contracts simpler and easier to understand. Based in Manchester City Centre, the business is made up of a 30-strong team of experts in legal, development and technology. The software can integrate into the daily life of any business, with integrations for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Word, Excel, Slack and Google Chrome.
