Qualcomm backs SpotDraft to scale AI on device contract with value doubling to $400m

As demand grows for privacy-enhancing 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 extension values ​​SpotDraft at about $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly doubling its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B last February.

Across regulated sectors, companies have moved quickly to test generative artificial intelligence, but concerns about privacy, security and data governance continue to slow adoption of sensitive workflows – particularly in the legal realm, where contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing and contract terms. Industry research has consistently flagged data security and privacy as key barriers to broader GenAI deployment in professional services, pushing vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep core contract intelligence on the user’s device rather than routing it through the cloud.

At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated its VerifAI workflow running end-to-end on Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, performing contract review and edits offline while the document is stored on the local machine. SpotDraft said Internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing and collaboration functions, but contract review, risk scoring and redlining can run completely offline without sending documents to the cloud.

SpotDraft sees legal as an early evidence base for on-device enterprise AI, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security and compliance limitations.

“The future of what enterprise AI is going to be — right now, there has 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 the device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured top left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.

SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capabilities extend beyond simply generating overviews, with the tool designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly into Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already work. “VerifAI will compare a contract against your guidelines, your playbooks, your past policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured top right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.

Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI emerges most clearly in tightly regulated sectors, including defense and pharma, where internal security reviews and data retention 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 output quality and response times, Bhagat said. “Now we’ve gotten to a place where, in terms of eval, we’re seeing as little as 5% difference between the frontier models and some of these fine-tuned on device models,” he said, adding that speeds on newer chips are now “a third of what we’re getting in the cloud.”

Since launching in 2017, SpotDraft said it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 last February, and counts Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin and Whatfix among its users. The company said adoption is increasing on its contract lifecycle management platform, with customers now processing over 1 million contracts annually, contract volume growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users. It also expects 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, after growing 169% in 2024 and a similar growth rate in 2025, though it did not share specific revenue numbers.

SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its corporate presence across the Americas, the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond co-development funding and go-to-market efforts for on-device deployment. 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 over 300 employees, including 15-20 in the US, where COO Akshay Verma is based, and four to five in the UK, with the rest of the workforce in Bengaluru.

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