Qualcomm backs SpotDraft to scale on-device contract AI with valuation doubling toward $400M

As demand grows for privacy-focused 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 scale its on-device contract review technology for regulated legal workflows.

The expansion values ​​SpotDraft at about $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation after its $56 million Series B in February last year.

In regulated industries, companies have moved quickly to test generative AI, but concerns about privacy, security and data management continue to slow the adoption of sensitive workflows – especially in the legal sector, where contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing and deal terms. Industry research has done this consistently marked data security and privacy are key barriers to broader deployment of GenAI in professional services, driving vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep key contract information on the user’s device rather than routing it through the cloud.

At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated the VerifAI workflow runs end-to-end on Snapdragon SpotDraft said internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing and collaboration functions, but contract review, risk scoring and redlining can take place completely offline without sending documents to the cloud.

SpotDraft sees the legal industry as an early testing ground for enterprise AI on devices, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security and compliance constraints.

“The future of what enterprise AI will look like – right now there needs to be AI that is close to the document, that is privacy critical, latency sensitive, [and] legally sensitive, and those are the things that will move on the device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.

SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capabilities go beyond just generating summaries, with the tool designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly in Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already work. “VerifAI compares a contract to your guidelines, your playbooks, and your previous policies,” says 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 tightly regulated industries, including defense and pharmaceuticals, where internal security reviews and data location 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 times, Bhagat said. “Now we’re at a point where, in terms of evaluation, we’re only seeing a 5% difference between the frontier models, and some of these have been fine-tuned on device models,” he said, adding that speeds on newer chips are now “a third of what we get in the cloud.”

Since launching in 2017, SpotDraft said it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 in February last year, and its users include Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin and Whatfix. The company says adoption on 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 business presence in the Americas, the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond funding to co-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.

Bengaluru- and New York-based SpotDraft said it has a team of more than 300 employees, including 15 to 20 in the US, where COO Akshay Verma is based, and four to five in Britain, while the rest of the workforce is in Bengaluru.

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