Harbour, a startup specializing in contract management, has successfully secured $15 million in a Series A funding round. Notable participants in this funding round include Jonathan Klein, co-founder of Getty Images, as well as Scribble Ventures and The Palmer Company. This recent investment increases Harbour’s total funding to $20 million, and the funds will be utilized for expanding the company’s team, enhancing its sales and go-to-market strategies, and providing support for ongoing engineering and product development efforts.
CEO and co-founder Josh Elkes emphasized the importance of finding the right balance between automation and augmentation as artificial intelligence continues to play a larger role in various markets. Harbour’s approach is to augment business processes rather than replace them. The platform is designed to seamlessly integrate with other systems and facilitate the movement of contracts within an enterprise from the drafting stage to execution.
Elkes, with a background in content licensing at Downtown Music and Getty Images, conceived the idea of an automation platform for creating business contracts. He partnered with Eric Doversberger, who spent over a decade on Google’s people analytics team, after they discovered their shared interest in streamlining legal back-office workflows at a San Francisco Ballet event.
Harbour functions as a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, featuring modules that simplify contract drafting, modification, and signing processes. It offers tools for redlining, version control, contract templates, e-signature integration, and real-time editing. Additionally, it can be configured to trigger actions such as background checks and updates to customer relationship management records. Harbour employs AI to extract actionable company information from documents, issue alerts, and identify differences in contractual language for further review. The platform can even autonomously draft and update contractual language, subject to human approval.
Elkes stated that Harbour’s entire product, including workflows and contracts, can be easily embedded and highly customized to match any aesthetic. It converts agreements into shareable links, streamlining the signing process.
While Elkes did not disclose exact revenue figures, he mentioned that Harbour’s business has tripled annually and now exceeds $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Harbour serves a customer base of over 2,000 companies, including large entertainment firms and government entities. Notable clients include Paramount, Lincoln Center, and Smartshift, a gig economy platform.
The contract lifecycle management (CLM) space is experiencing rapid growth, with Gartner predicting a threefold increase in legal tech spending, which includes CLM, by 2025. Harbour faces competition from companies like SpotDraft, LexCheck, SirionLabs, and Icertis, but Elkes remains confident in Harbour’s ability to succeed in this expanding field.
Elkes stressed that Harbour has maintained a highly efficient and cash-flow positive business model since its inception. The decision to continue investing in growth reflects the substantial market opportunity and the ideal timing to introduce a next-generation contract management platform to the market.
