LinkSquares - MGMT Boston

Founders: Chris Combs & Vishal Sunak
Founding: 2015
Mission: Empowers businesses to write better contracts, analyze what’s in existing contracts, and collaborate more effectively across teams
Employees: 400+ & 75% Local
Workplace: Hybrid (By Team)
Stage & Capital Raised: Series C & $161.46M raised
Investors: G Squared, G2 Venture Partners, Jump Capital, MassMutual Ventures, Sorenson Capital
Key Customers: Boston Celtics, DraftKings, Drift, Fitbit, Igloo, TGI Fridays, Wayfair, etc.
Glassdoor Rating: 4.4
Valuation (estimated): $500M – $2B ($800M valuation published in their Q2 ‘22 Series C fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

LinkSquares is an AI-powered legal software platform for businesses & in-house legal teams. In 2015, Founders Vishal Sunak (CEO) & Chris Combs (SVP, BD) spent almost a year researching the problem they eventually set out to solve – streamlining contract management in order to free up teams to solve their business problems. This is a Boston-based growth software company, if there ever was one, aiming to become a local tech employer for many years to come.

Vishal and Chris worked together at Backupify before the company was acquired by Datto. Vishal was in Operations and Chris was in Business Development. What do Operations and Business Development teams collaborate on the most? Especially when going through due diligence for an acquisition? Capabilities and…contracts. They kept encountering the same problem. There was no central repository that indexed their various legal commitments. They had to keep digging into Salesforce, Dropbox, or wherever else their legal files had been PDF’d to try to uncover what they’d committed to across all of their partnerships. What were the payment terms of Contract A? What indemnities were committed to in Contracts B & C? Was that customer’s data meant to be siloed from the obligation in Contract D back in 2019? You see where I’m going with this. Legal contracts are long. They’re wordy. They’re in English but also…not quite. And those kind people of the law don’t add nice neat summaries at the top of their contracts with all the sharp edges contained therein.

Vishal & Chris researched their concept by talking to hundreds of legal professionals to see if anyone else had the same challenges keeping contracts organized. They distilled their learnings and took the plunge to build LinkSquares, an AI-powered SaaS platform helping businesses and in-house corporate legal teams make better decisions through more intelligent contract management.

The company started by building a solution to transpose PDFs and make them searchable by their customers. Today, LinkSquares is a “horizontal” SaaS platform empowering businesses of all types to write better contracts, analyze what’s in existing contracts, and collaborate more effectively across teams. They’re using AI to supercharge their product suite too. Imagine the benefits of machine learning algorithms that can train for common legal language like payment terms and specific legal commitments to categorize business risks across a contract base, alerting teams to various potential exposures. Before LinkSquares, AI wasn’t exactly heavily leveraged in the legal space.

Companies use LinkSquares to analyze their contracts, organize legal repositories using intelligent algorithms, and build reports to get a 360 view of business risks, opportunities, and results. They effectively offer a highly specialized CLM (contract lifecycle management) platform to in-house teams, which benefits other functions like Finance, Procurement, Sales, and Human Resources. Their clients range from 50-person startups to 5,000-person global organizations that need more accuracy, insights, and data across their numerous contracts. Like adding another team member who can work around the clock with accuracy. Their platform covers a whole suite of use cases, with product solutions across Contract Review, Crisis Management, Contract Storage, Data Privacy & Compliance, Deal Acceleration, Fundraising and M&A, and Third Party Paper Management.

The numbers to help validate their progress are impressive. LinkSquares completed a Series C round of fundraising in April of 2022, valuing the company at $800M. They’ve processed over 4M documents and 100M unique data points, tracking more than 100 critical terms for categorization. Their team has doubled to more than 400 employees over the past 12 months and ARR (annual recurring revenue) is well north of $30M. LinkSquares doubled its customer base over the past year to 800+ legal teams – and achieved over 2,000% subscription revenue growth in the last three years.

LinkSquares embraces a hybrid work culture after a year of serious growth, recognizing the value of face-to-face interactions while maintaining the flexibility that allows employees to work from home. Leadership is trusted to determine how their teams do their best work, be it remotely or in the office. Some teams are entirely remote and they’re building resilience to support those employees. The entire executive team comes into the office on Tuesdays. The revenue team is in 5 days a week to support their “All In” vibrant office culture, and they work with a mindset coach brought on by CRO Steve Travaglini to help optimize their performance. The “build team”, which encompasses product & engineering, is aligned under one leader, too – Andrew Leverone.

Operators to Know (Locally):

Mel Bailey, Engineering Leader
Sunil Berry, Sr. Director, Finance and Strategy
Neil Brown, Director of Sales
Ashlyn Donohue, Legal Director
Sean Gilbert, Director of Product Design
David Guerrera, Creative Director
Dave Learoyd, Sr. Director, Financial Planning & Analysis
Caroline McCarthy, Director of Sales
Angelica Perrone, Senior Director, Demand Generation
Benjamin Small, Senior Software Engineer
Katie Thornton, Senior Director of Content
Amanda Walker, Director of Talent Acquisition
BobbieJean Wood, Group Product Manager of Data Engineering and Internal Tools

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the LinkSquares team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

What are LinkSquares’ key company initiatives for 2023?
How has AI accelerated the platform capabilities? What advancements will machine learning research help drive for LinkSquares next?
How do LinkSquares’ largest customers use the platform vs. common startup use cases?
Is there a specific company lifecycle moment that helps drive customer onboarding i.e. fundraising, M&A, minimum legal team size or pace of company growth?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about LinkSquares you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more legal teams & companies into the digital age. All free wheeling GTM teams applaud your efforts. See you around town & TD Garden!

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