As demand grows for 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 expansion to extend its on-device contract review technology to regulated legal workflows.
The expansion values SpotDraft at about $380 million, the company told TechCrunch, nearly double its post-money valuation of $190 million following a $56 million Series B last February.
Across regulated sectors, companies are moving quickly to test generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow adoption of sensitive workflows. Particularly in the legal field, contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing, and terms and conditions. Industry research consistently cites data security and privacy as a key barrier to widespread adoption of GenAI in professional services, pushing vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep core contract intelligence on users’ devices rather than routing it through the cloud.
At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated a VerifAI workflow running end-to-end on a Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop, performing contract reviews and editing offline while keeping documents on the local machine. SpotDraft says that login, licensing, and collaboration features will still require an internet connection, but contract reviews, risk scoring, and redlining can be done completely offline without sending documents to the cloud.
SpotDraft sees legitimacy 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.
“As far as what enterprise AI is going to be, right now we need document-like AI, which is privacy sensitive, latency sensitive, (and) legally sensitive, and that moves on the device,” SpotDraft co-founder and CEO Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left) said in an interview.
SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capabilities go beyond simply generating summaries, with tools designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly within Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already do it. “VerifAI compares contracts to guidelines, playbooks, and previous 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 highly regulated sectors such as defense and pharmaceuticals, where internal security reviews and data retention requirements can slow or block the use of cloud-based AI tools on sensitive documents.
On-device models are rapidly closing the gap with cloud-based systems in both output quality and response time, Bhagat said. “We’re now at a point from a valuation standpoint where we’re only seeing a 5% difference between the Frontier model and some of the models that have been tweaked in the device model,” he said, adding that the new chips’ speeds are now “a third of what you can get in the cloud.”
SpotDraft says it has more than 700 customers since its launch in 2017, up from about 400 in February last year, and its users also include Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin and Whatfix. The company says adoption of its contract lifecycle management platform is increasing, with customers now processing more than 1 million contracts annually, contract volume up 173% year-over-year, and approximately 50,000 monthly active users. Although the company did not disclose specific sales numbers, it expects sales to grow by 169% in 2024, a similar growth rate in 2025, and then 100% year-on-year growth in 2026.
SpotDraft plans to use the new funding to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its corporate presence across the Americas, EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond funding to joint development and go-to-market efforts for on-device deployment. The startup’s on-device workflow is currently available to a limited number of customers, but the founders expect it to expand more widely as compatible AI PC hardware becomes more widely available.
Bengaluru and New York-based SpotDraft said it has a team of over 300 employees, with 15-20 in the US where COO Akshay Verma is based, 4-5 in the UK and the rest in Bengaluru.
To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including its latest investment from Qualcomm Ventures. Previous investors include Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures and Prosus Ventures.
