Qualcomm backs SpotDraft to scale AI contracts on devices with $400M doubling price

As demand grows for a privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale contract review technology in tools for regulated legal workflows.

The extension valued SpotDraft at $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly doubling its post-money valuation of $190 million after $56 million Series B in February last year.

Across the regulated sector, companies have been quick to test generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow the use of sensitive workflows — especially legal ones, where contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing, and deal terms. Industry research has been ongoing flag data security and privacy are major obstacles to deploying GenAI more widely in professional services, forcing vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep core contract intelligence on user devices rather than routing it through the cloud.

At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft shown VerifAI workflows run end-to-end on Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, performing contract reviews and offline edits while saving documents on the local machine. SpotDraft says internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing, and collaboration features, but contract review, risk scoring, and redlining can work offline without sending documents to the cloud.

SpotDraft sees legal as an early proof for enterprise AI on devices, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be forwarded through external cloud models due to privacy, security, and compliance limitations.

“The future is how enterprise AI works – now, there needs to be an AI that’s close to the document, that’s privacy critical, latency sensitive, (and) legal sensitive, and that’s what’s going to be done on the device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.

SpotDraft says the capabilities in the VerifAI tool go beyond just creating briefs, with tools designed to implement playbooks and recommendations directly in Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already work. “VerifAI will compare the contract against your guidelines, your playbook, your previous policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured above, right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.

Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI is most evident in highly regulated sectors, including defense and pharmaceuticals, where internal security reviews and data residency requirements can slow or block the use of cloud-based AI tools for sensitive documents.

The on-device model is rapidly closing the gap with cloud-based systems, both in output quality and response time, Bhagat said. “Now we’ve reached a point where, in terms of eval, we’re seeing a difference of only 5% between the frontier model, and some well-tuned device models,” he said, adding that speeds on newer chips are now “a third of what we’re getting in the cloud.”

Since launching in 2017, SpotDraft says it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 in February last year, and counts Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin, and Whatfix among its users. The company says adoption is growing on its contract lifecycle management platform, with customers now processing more than 1 million contracts annually, contract volume growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users. It also expects 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, after growing 169% in 2024 and posting the same growth rate in 2025, although it did not share specific revenue figures.

SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to expand its AI products and capabilities and expand the company’s presence across the Americas, the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) region, and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond funding to joint development and go-to-market efforts for device deployment. The workflow on the startup’s device is currently available to a limited number of customers, and the founders expect more to come as compatible PC AI hardware becomes more widely available.

Bengaluru and New York-based SpotDraft says it has a team of over 300 employees, including 15-20 in the US, where COO Akshay Verma is based, and four to five in the UK, with the rest of its workforce in Bengaluru.

To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including the latest Qualcomm Ventures investment. Earlier investors included Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures, and Prosus Ventures.