As demand grows for enterprise privacy AI that can operate without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft 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 expansion values SpotDraft at about $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following a $54 million Series B in February of last year.
In regulated sectors, businesses have moved quickly to test genetic AI, but concerns about privacy, security and data governance continue to slow adoption for sensitive workflows — especially in legal matters, where contracts can involve privileged information, intellectual property, pricing and terms of agreement. Industry research has consistently flag Security and data privacy as key barriers to broader deployment of GenAI in business services, prompting 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 it turned out VerifAI’s workflow runs end-to-end on Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, performing contract checking and offline edits while keeping the document on the local machine. SpotDraft said an Internet connection is still required for login, licensing and collaboration features, but contract review, risk scoring and redlining can work completely offline without sending documents to the cloud.
SpotDraft sees legal as an early proving ground for enterprise AI on device, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security and compliance constraints.
“The future of what business AI is going to look like—right now, there has to be AI that’s document-close, privacy-critical, latency-sensitive, [and] it’s legally sensitive and those are the things that will move on the device,” Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, said in an interview.
SpotDraft says VerifAI’s capability on the device extends beyond simply creating summaries, with the tool designed to implement books and recommendations directly within Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already do. “VerifAI will compare a contract against your guidelines, your books, your previous policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured above, right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.
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Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI is most apparent in highly regulated sectors, including defense and pharmaceuticals, where internal security reviews and data residency requirements can slow or prevent 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 value, we’re seeing just a 5% difference between the high-end models and some of these enhanced device models,” he said, adding that speeds on the newest chips are now “a third of what we have in the cloud.”
Since launching in 2017, SpotDraft said it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 in February last year, and counts Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin and Whatfix among its users. The company said adoption is growing 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 showing a similar growth rate in 2025, though it did not share specific revenue figures.
SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its business presence across the Americas, the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond funding to joint development and go-to-market efforts for development on the device. The on-device startup workflow is currently available to a limited set of customers, and the founders expect it to expand more widely as compatible AI PC hardware becomes more widely available.
“SpotDraft’s ability to deploy its proprietary models securely on the device using Snapdragon platforms represents a significant advance for a privacy-critical industry,” said Quinn Li, senior vice president of Qualcomm Technologies and global head of Qualcomm Ventures.
Bengaluru and New York-based SpotDraft said it has a team of 300-plus 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 Bangalore.
To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including the latest investment from Qualcomm Ventures. Its previous investors include Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures and Prosus Ventures.
