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Do you understand the information contained in your ETF documents? An ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) is a type of investment product that allows buyers to invest in diversified securities at once, for a single price. They are traded on stock exchanges and can be bought and sold during a trading day, in a similar manner to stocks. This allows an individual to participate in the gains and losses of the underlying securities held within the ETF. ETFs typically follow one particular index or sector which means that they replicate that particular focus. The vast majority of ETFs are not managed by humans, which has, in part, led to their rise in popularity among investors.

Recently, legaltech commentator Zach Abramowitz posed a provocative question: “Has CLM reached product market fit?” Product/market fit is, roughly, whether a product meets strong market demand, but the definition is pretty squishy and inexact1 . Since the definition of product/market fit (aka “PMF”) is squishy, Abramowitz considers a bunch of indicators. “how total number of users would increase if marketing were to slow down. Is the number of users growing organically or is traction simply a product of marketing?”

Are your contracts doing enough to protect your company from unforeseen circumstances like inflation? In January 2022 the U.S. inflation rate climbed to its highest level in 40 years1 , with prices rising by 7.5% from a year ago. It has had a significant impact on many, including the companies (both buyers and vendors) that have been trying to survive the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation brings risk and uncertainty along with it, and it might be doing more harm to your business than you’re aware of.

Tl;dr: Building contract AI yourself is costly. More problematically, it’s hard to get the tech right. You risk spending a significant amount of time and effort and still ending up with a solution (that you have to maintain) which isn’t as good as what competitors have through licensing tech. As the leader of a software vendor, you (and your teams) are constantly making buy/build decisions. I’ve been there. Over a decade, I was CEO of Kira Systems as we grew from two people to over 200, building a dominant position in our main market.

Over the last stretch, Google has been getting lots of attention for their Contract DocAI (a/k/a Google Contract Document AI) product. Since Zuva API product also enables software developers to embed pre-built contract analysis artificial intelligence into their applications via an API, I’ve been asked how I feel about having Google Contract DocAI as a competitor. Here’s a legaltech friend’s note: Was just thinking about you this week while investigating Google’s new DocAI tool Ironclad is using. If we were getting beers I would ask your thoughts on how this will impact the market. Since beers may be a long time away, dropping it in here.

Funding to accelerate product development and commercial go to market initiatives Zuva, a document intelligence company that uses AI to help businesses understand the details of their documents, today announced the closing of a $20 million Series A funding round. Led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, this funding round accompanies the launch of the company’s first product, Zuva API. Zuva API is an API-driven platform that enables developers to implement AI features into their applications, without requiring AI development from the ground-up. It can classify documents and extract key clauses written in non-standard natural language from business contracts and documents, and comes with over 1,300 pre-trained AI models. Users can also create their own models without requiring data science or machine learning development knowledge, and leverage Zuva’s cloud platform for their hosting needs, or opt to host it on their own infrastructure on Kubernetes.