It’s inevitable for bureaucratic red tape to be plastered across business contracts, given the paperwork is designed to ensure all involved parties are as safe as possible, which can lead to large companies buried under mountains of the sticky stuff. Now, Juro, the contract management business, has received investment for its machine-learning technology to address the issue.
With an AI-powered, “design-centric” approach in mind to streamline and beautify the management of high-volume sales contracts, Juro has secured $2m in a seed funding round led by Point Nine Capital, the angel venture capital firm. Other contributors to the investment included names such as Seedcamp, the European seed fund – which supported Juro’s previous $750,000 seed round with Point Nine Capital in 2017 – TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Gumtree co-founder Michael Pennington and Indeed co-founder Paul Forster.
The funding will allow Juro to hire new machine-learning engineers and data scientists who will be charged with supercharging its capabilities, which have so far attracted the eyes of such customers as Estee Lauder, Deliveroo and Nested. With the International Data Corporation, the market researcher, forecasting AI and machine-learning spending to grow from $12bn in 2017 to $57.6bn by 2021, it’s easy to see why.
Speaking to TechCrunch about the funding, Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of Juro, said: “We actually could have strung it out to Series A. But we had multiple offers come in and there is so much of an explosion in demand for the [machine-learning] that it made sense to do a round now rather than wait for the A. The whole legal industry is undergoing radical change and we want to be leading it.”
Mabey added that the Juro team and investors are on course to go beyond contract management as their passion extends to providing an education on data clients have access to, including negotiating and recognising irregularities.
Juro’s success shows the recent explosion in machine-learning and blockchain technology is well-founded, providing fertile pastures for startups and the businesses they serve. 
