As demand increases for privacy-focused enterprise AI that can operate without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B expansion to scale its on-device contract review technology for regulated legal workflows.
The expansion values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its post-money valuation of $190 million after launch. $56 million, Series B in February last year.
Across regulated industries, businesses have been rapidly testing generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow the adoption of sensitive workflows, particularly in legal, where contracts can include inside information, intellectual property, pricing, and transaction terms. Industrial research has always reported Data security and privacy pose major obstacles to GenAI’s broader deployment in professional services, pushing vendors like SpotDraft to seek architectures that keep core contract information on the user’s device rather than routing it through the cloud.
At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated its VerifAI workflow runs end-to-end on Snapdragon SpotDraft said internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing and collaboration features, but contract review, risk scoring and review can run entirely offline without sending documents to the cloud.
SpotDraft sees the legal field as an early testing ground for on-device enterprise AI, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security and compliance constraints.
“The future of enterprise AI will be — right now, there needs to be near-document AI, which is privacy-critical, latency-aware, [and] legally sensitive, and these are the things that will evolve on the device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.
SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capability goes beyond just generating summaries, with the tool designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly in Microsoft Word, as legal teams already do. “VerifAI will compare a contract to your guidelines, to your playbooks, to your past policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured above, right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.
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Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI is most evident in tightly regulated industries, including defense and pharmaceutical, where internal security reviews and data residency requirements can slow or block the use of cloud-based AI tools for sensitive documents.
On-device models have quickly closed the gap with cloud-based systems, both in terms of output quality and response time, Bhagat said. “Now we’re at a point where, in terms of evaluation, we’re seeing a difference of just 5% between the frontier models and some of these tweaked device models,” he said, adding that the speeds of newer chips are now “a third of what we’re getting in the cloud.”
Since its launch in 2017, SpotDraft said 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 said adoption of its contract lifecycle management platform is increasing, with customers now processing more than 1 million contracts annually, contract volumes growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users. It also expects 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, following 169% growth in 2024 and a similar growth rate in 2025, although it did not share specific revenue figures.
SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its corporate presence in the Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond funding into joint development and go-to-market efforts for on-device deployments. The startup’s on-device workflow is currently available to a limited number of customers, and the founders expect it to expand more widely as compatible AI PC hardware becomes more widely available.
SpotDraft, based in Bengaluru and New York, said 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 the workforce in Bengaluru.
To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including the latest investment from Qualcomm Ventures. Its first investors include Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures and Prosus Ventures.
