You might not be familiar with the name Tomoro, but it’s not actually a new startup. Tomorro is a French contract management platform originally launched as Leeway. And today, the company is announcing its new brand and an $11.9 million (€11 million) funding round.
The reason Leeway is becoming Tomorro is that the company believes we are on the cusp of a huge wave of adoption of so-called contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools. With the Covid pandemic, many companies have discovered the convenience of electronic signatures and cannot imagine canceling their DocuSign subscription. Now, the next step is contract management.
Resonance led the Series A round with Financière Saint James, Motier Ventures, existing investor HenQ and several angel investors also participating. While many startups complain that it can be difficult to raise a round in the current funding environment, Tomorro hasn’t faced any major problems.
“We didn’t feel any particular difficulties. The roadshow was very fast and in three weeks or a month it was mostly done,” co-founder and CEO Antoine Fabre told me. The due diligence process took a bit longer than that of course. He talked to about 15 VC funds for this round. As a data point, Tomorro currently has around 200 customers.
So what exactly does Tomorro do? Instead of using Microsoft Word to write contracts and an Excel spreadsheet to jot down amounts, due dates, and other relevant information, Tomorro acts as a central repository for all your contracting needs — no more checking to see if “Important contract v3.1 final FINAL.docx’ is indeed the latest version of a particular contract.
It looks like an electronic drive with folders and documents, but it is a multiplayer tool with additional features. Tomorro allows you to edit documents directly in your browser, which means you can create a library of templates (with variables) and suggest modifications from there.
Once a contract is completed, Tomorro can send approval notifications to other relevant team members. On the flip side, the startup also supports basic electronic signatures and has integration with DocuSign for advanced signatures.
Image Credits: Tomoro
All of these features are nice, but Tomorro gets interesting when you start thinking about ways to automate and streamline contract management. For example, Tomorro can track contracts that are about to expire.
“A product like the one we’re building makes a lot of sense in the current context, as companies need to control their commitments to their suppliers. They need to know when they can cancel if they want to cancel,” Fabre said.
The tool can also be integrated with a CRM like Salesforce so that a contract is automatically created once a salesperson is ready to sign a new customer without having to log into Tomorro’s interface.
“The legal team is pinging if it is necessary to intervene in a contract. Otherwise, they are signed independently. So the legal department saves time and the sales department is much more efficient,” said Fabre.
The startup also recently added AI features to reword the text or change the tone of the contract. In the future, the company plans to add more AI capabilities so you can “talk to your contract” instead of scrolling through 30 pages.
Tomorro is not the first and only contract-focused company. There are other contract lifecycle management companies, such as Ironclad in the USA. For now, Tomorro is still very focused on the French market. However, it plans to address other European markets in the next two years.
“There are many players in this fast-growing market. I often compare it to the e-signature market five years ago,” Fabre said. “We are not yet at the same stage of mass adoption as e-signature is today, but we can sense a significant acceleration in the adoption of these tools.”
