Professional and information services company Wolters Kluwer has acquired contract lifecycle management software provider CLM Matrix for $35 million, further pushing it into the growing contract management market.

Jonah Paransky, executive vice president and general manager at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, said that CLM Matrix will continue to be sold as a stand-alone product, while at the same time being integrated into the company's spend and matter management products.

“It is our plan to invest in the growth of CLM Matrix to both grow in the market broadly and bring it to the [enterprise legal management] customer base,” he said.

Paransky explained that such an integration between CLM Matrix and Wolters Kluwer ELM products “makes sense” primarily because “contract lifecycle matter is a natural adjacency to matter and spend management.” He added that the M&A Clause Analytics platform will be one of the products the company will be evaluating in terms of integration with CLM Matrix. The platform, which launched in 2017, looks to help attorneys streamline the drafting of standard M&A contracts.

The new acquisition come just six months after Wolters Kluwer also acquired France-based contract management platform Legisway.

However, Paransky noted that while Legisway is a part of Wolters Kluwer's legal and regulatory division, which focuses on small business and law firms, CLM Matrix will operate separately in the company's enterprise legal management division, with an eye toward serving global and enterprise organizations.

When asked about the impetus behind acquiring CLM Matrix, Paransky pointed to Wolters Kluwer's desire to expand its “relationships in corporate legal” and help them meet their growing needs around solving contract lifecycle management challenges.

He added that Wolters Kluwer chose to acquire CLM Matrix in large part because of its “strong focus on ease of use, [and] ease of implementation.”

With its latest acquisition Wolters Kluwer moves deeper into a crowded market that has seen a flurry of investment and acquisitions in recent months. In September 2018, for instance, Kira Systems raised $50 million in its first outside funding round, with an eye to further expand its contract review services.

A month later, contract management platform provider Concord also raised $25 million in a Series B funding, which it intends to use to further develop its core technology and expand globally. In December 2018, legal services and tech provider Elevate also grew its contract services with the acquisition of contract management and technology company Sumati Group.

And in a rare instance of a legal tech partnership leading to funding, e-signature company DocuSign invested $15 million in contracts analytics company Seal Software in late March 2019.  The investment came less than a year after Seal also secured $30 from venture capital firm Toba Capital.

Paransky said he is encouraged by the growing number of well-funded contract management companies in the market. “I see that level of investment as a healthy and normal reaction to a large high-growth software market with lots of customers with problems they are trying to solve, many of [whom] haven't found the solution to those problems yet.”

He added that Wolters Kluwer is uniquely positioned to compete in the market due to its “deep relationships with a number of corporate legal teams” and its position as “a leading [solution] provider of a highly adjacent space—spend and matter management.”