With Haveli\u2019s partnership, Sirion said, it will aim to accelerate product innovation, expand its global go-to-market presence, and enable organizations to move from static contract repositories to intelligent, workflow-driven contracting.<\/p>\n
\u201cSirion is building AI that works directly inside enterprise contracting workflows, helping teams draft, negotiate and manage agreements faster and with greater confidence,\u201d said founder and CEO Ajay Agrawal<\/a>.<\/p>\n The deal, first disclosed in January<\/a>, gives Haveli a controlling stake in the company and clears out Sirion\u2019s earlier investors, including Sequoia and Tiger Global. Agrawal, in an exclusive interview with LawNext, describes the deal as not a traditional fundraise, but a strategic recapitalization.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat it\u2019s not is a buyout or a kind of a huge strategic fundraise,\u201d Agrawal told me in an interview Friday. \u201cThe company was already profitable before this transaction. We had more than half the money from our previous round still sitting on our balance sheet.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, Agrawal explained, the deal was driven by a need for board-level simplification. With investors from different eras \u2013 some on the cap table for more than 11 years \u2013 Sirion was navigating competing interests and motivations at the board level.<\/p>\n Haveli\u2019s entry resolves that by buying out the earlier investors entirely, leaving the company with what Agrawal calls \u201ca cohesive, unified voice at the board level at a time when corporate strategy and business strategy need to keep pace with the developments on the frontier model side.\u201d<\/p>\n Haveli may not be a well-known investment firm in legal tech, but Agrawal made clear he considers it a major get. The firm was founded in 2021 by Brian Sheth, who previously cofounded Vista Equity Partners.<\/p>\n Haveli\u2019s debut fund, Agrawal said, is the largest first-time software-only private equity fund ever raised \u2013 a $4.5 billion vehicle \u2013 and the firm is highly selective about its portfolio companies, bringing with it a value-creation playbook developed across more than 400 software companies.<\/p>\n Haveli has not previously invested directly in legal tech, although it has invested in legal-adjacent companies such as document management company M-Files<\/a> and ERP platform Certinia<\/a>. That is fitting, because, in our interview, Agrawal himself pushed back on the legal tech label for his own company.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t really see CLM as a legal tech category,\u201d he said. \u201cNinety percent of the funding comes from a combination of procurement, sales operations and IT, with only 10% coming directly from legal.\u201d<\/p>\n While he acknowledged that \u201cdown-market\u201d CLM players, as he described them, such as Ironclad, Agiloft and ContractPodAi, engage heavily with legal buyers, he said that \u201cthe moment you move up market into the enterprise segment, legal is an interested party, but not the one with the cash.\u201d<\/p>\n Agrawal was emphatic that this is not a typical private equity transaction.<\/p>\n Ajay Agrawal<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis is not your typical private equity investment, where the playbook is to come in and cut cost,\u201d he said. \u201cThe first thing they said to us is, \u2018How can we expand our product leadership in this category? What are the investments that we need to make?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For Sirion\u2019s customers, the deal should be a positive signal, Agrawal said. While daily operations will not change, Haveli\u2019s backing will accelerate Sirion\u2019s generative AI roadmap, including investments in GPU infrastructure and expanded R&D, Agrawal said.<\/p>\n On the growth front, Agrawal said the company has been expanding at nearly 50% annually and is profitable.<\/p>\n The transaction also creates a liquidity event for employees with stock options, something Agrawal said is becoming a \u201cSirion tradition,\u201d in that this is the second such employee liquidity opportunity since the company was founded in 2012.<\/p>\n The last time I had an in-depth conversation with Agrawal was in 2022, when Sirion raised an $85 million Series D round<\/a>, and he was a guest on my LawNext podcast<\/a> in 2020, not long after the company had raised a $44 million Series C round.<\/p>\n In our conversation Friday, we talked about how Sirion\u2019s AI approach has evolved since then \u2013 and what Agrawal sees as his company\u2019s enduring competitive edge.<\/p>\n He traced the evolution in three stages. When we spoke three years ago, Sirion was using small- and medium-language models to extract structured data from contracts and flag deviations from playbooks \u2013 what the company called \u201ccontextual deviation.\u201d<\/p>\n With the arrival of GPT-3.5, the platform moved from identifying problems to explaining them in plain English \u2013 what Agrawal called \u201cissue detection and issue summarization.\u201d The third phase, enabled by GPT-4 and subsequent models, was auto-redlining \u2013 the ability to mark up contracts much like a junior attorney.<\/p>\n Today, Sirion is emphasizing what Agrawal calls \u201cconversational search\u201d \u2013 allowing users to query their entire contract portfolio in natural language.<\/p>\n But he was careful to emphasize that the key underlying engine is not the large language model itself. Rather, it is a layer of what he calls \u201ctemplate imprinting micro APIs\u201d that translate a user\u2019s plain-English query into the specific language of a company\u2019s SQL database.<\/p>\n Ask for all contracts expiring in southern Europe without an ESG clause, and the system can figure out that \u201csouthern Europe\u201d is not a category in the database, but Italy is, so it converts the query accordingly, showing its work in the chain of thought so the user can understand.<\/p>\n Agrawal said that this architecture reflects a core conviction he has held for years, which is that LLMs alone cannot be trusted for high-stakes contracting decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cLLMs today are probabilistic in their reasoning process, not deterministic,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t pay payroll saying Bob will get his salary 80% of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n For that reason, he argues that sub-million-parameter, highly deterministic small language models will remain the workhorse of enterprise contracting for the foreseeable future. He further believes that competitors who skipped the decade-long work of building those models will not be able to close the gap simply by plugging in the latest frontier model.<\/p>\n Agrawal pointed to Sirion\u2019s 2024 acquisition of Eigen<\/a>, a leader in intelligent document processing, as a key expansion of this capability.<\/p>\n The Eigen technology allows Sirion to read engineering reports, service-level backup data, and other non-contract documents, then connect them back to contract obligations. That enables Sirion to flag, for instance, when a supplier\u2019s documented underperformance means a client is being overbilled.<\/p>\n On the acquisition front, Agrawal signaled interest but patience. He sees the CLM market heading toward a reckoning, with some players ending up on \u201cthe wrong side of AI history\u201d and becoming available at steep discounts.<\/p>\n At least for the near term, his preference is for what he calls \u201ctech tuck-ins\u201d \u2013 targeted acquisitions of interesting AI technology, similar to its acquisitions of Eigen and Zendoc, which it acquired in 2022<\/a> \u2013 rather than for large revenue-driven M&As.<\/p>\nWho Is Haveli?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A Different Kind of PE Deal<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lawnext.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Ajay-Agrawal_02-3.jpg?resize=300%2C450&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/strong>The Platform\u2019s AI Architecture<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The \u2018Workhorse of Enterprise Contracting\u2019<\/h3>\n
On the Foundation Model Threat<\/strong><\/h3>\n