Jerry Ting, co-founder of Evisort.

The AI-powered contract platform Evisort announced Thursday that it had closed a $15 million Series A funding round. Participants included Vertex Ventures, Amity Ventures, Serra Ventures and—perhaps the most recognizable name of the bunch—Microsoft Corp.'s M12 venture fund.

News of the funding round comes almost a year after Evisort first launched in December 2018, which was followed shortly thereafter by a $4.5 million seed funding round the following February. The platform leverages AI to read a variety of legal documents—contracts, invoices, statements of work, purchase orders—and classifies or tracks key provisions.

So why was now the time for another funding round? The company's target demographic has primarily consisted of corporate legal departments, but that has also served as a gateway to the rest of the enterprise.

"We were sort of waiting for the product to be well-adopted before we went out and expanded the rest of it," said Jerry Ting, the company's CEO and co-founder.

Interest from Microsoft didn't hurt either. The tech giant will gain a seat as an observer on Evisort's board and has also tasked a team member with identifying opportunities for the two companies to work together.

Ting said that many of Evisort's customers already use Microsoft's collaboration platform SharePoint to store their contracts. While Evisort already integrates with that solution, a closer product collaboration between the two companies is not out of the question moving forward.

"We are in the early innings of that kind of a conversation," Ting said.

As for the $15 million in Series A funding—well, Evisort has plans for that too. Per Ting, at least half of the money raised will be poured directly back into the product.

One of the company's key objectives is to continue building out contract workflows. For example, Evisort allows a company to establish a routine by which the platform notifies an attorney when a contract within a certain dollar threshold is set expire and is in need of review.

But AI doesn't train itself. Evisort already employees a large team of attorneys that downloads contracts over the internet and then tags them for data scientists to use as the basis for models. Money from the funding round will be used to expand that roster of engineers as well as launch a new research and development office in Montreal, Quebec.

The extra minds on staff may come in handy as the company looks to push its tech into the pre-signature phase of the contract process. Using AI, for example, the Evisort platform could read any changes that were made to a deal just prior to it being signed and determine whether they require peer review or if the adjustments were mostly immaterial.

"And so we're actually integrating ourselves into the sales process too," Ting said.

It always helps to have an edge, especially in the competitive contract management space. Players like Seal Software and BlackBoiler are also pushing into the preexecution market. And Evisort also isn't the only platform to attract interest from investors, with Luminance receiving $10 million in investments from venture capitalists and law firm Slaughter and May last February.

Ting believes that part of what distinguishes Evisort is its focus on the whole enterprise. But there is a certain educational component that often comes with that.

"When we're out there selling to customers it's almost never competitive. It's not like us versus somebody else. It's us versus a lack of knowledge," Ting said.