SpotDraft has secured a strategic $8 million investment from Qualcomm Ventures to expand its on-device contract AI, pushing the company’s valuation toward $400 million as enterprises accelerate privacy-first deployments for legal workflows.
The deal deepens a partnership centered on running contract review and redlining directly on PCs powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and other AI PC-class hardware. By keeping sensitive documents on local machines, SpotDraft aims to resolve the top adoption hurdles that have slowed cloud-based generative AI in legal: data privacy, confidentiality, and governance.
Why On-Device Capabilities Matter for Enterprise Legal AI
Legal teams handle privileged information, pricing, and intellectual property that many companies will not route through external clouds. Industry bodies such as the International Association of Privacy Professionals and the American Bar Association have repeatedly highlighted data retention, model training risk, and cross-border transfers as barriers to AI uptake in legal and compliance-heavy sectors.
SpotDraft’s answer is VerifAI, a contract workflow that executes risk scoring, clause comparisons, and redlines locally. Internet connectivity is still used for login, licensing, and collaboration, but the contract never needs to leave the device for review. The company positions this architecture as a way to meet enterprise data residency policies, privilege requirements, and internal audit controls without sacrificing speed.
Running In Word With Playbook-Level Control
Rather than asking lawyers to switch tools, VerifAI operates within Microsoft Word, applying a team’s own playbooks and fallback positions to the document in front of them. SpotDraft says the system compares clauses against internal standards, flags deviations, and drafts redlines in context, mirroring how legal teams already negotiate third‑party paper.
Under the hood, SpotDraft combines fine‑tuned compact language models with retrieval over local policy stores, enabling contract intelligence without cloud round trips. The company says internal evaluations show outputs within roughly 5% of frontier cloud models while bringing latency down to about one‑third of typical cloud processing times on newer chips.
Qualcomm’s Strategic Angle on On-Device Legal AI
For Qualcomm, the investment is a showcase for AI PCs and NPUs that execute practical enterprise workloads offline. The companies plan joint go‑to‑market efforts and technical co‑development to optimize VerifAI for Snapdragon platforms, focusing on quantization, memory footprint, and battery-aware inference so contract review can run smoothly during travel or in low-connectivity environments.
SpotDraft’s leaders frame legal as a proving ground for broader on-device enterprise AI: when AI must be close to the document for privacy, latency, or regulatory reasons, the workload migrates to the endpoint. If successful, the same pattern could extend to other sensitive workflows in finance, healthcare, and procurement.
Usage Growth and Revenue Trajectory for SpotDraft
Since launch, SpotDraft reports more than 700 customers, up from around 400 a year earlier, with brands such as Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin, and Whatfix. Customers now process over 1 million contracts annually on the platform, with contract volume up 173% year over year and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.
The company projects revenue to double in the coming year after back‑to‑back triple‑digit growth previously. While it has not disclosed absolute revenue, the pace suggests expanding seat adoption beyond legal into sales ops, procurement, and finance as organizations standardize playbooks and route more third‑party agreements through VerifAI.
Funding, Footprint, and the Global Rollout Plan
With the Qualcomm Ventures round, SpotDraft has raised $92 million to date from investors including Prosus Ventures, Vertex Growth, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, and Arkam Ventures. The company has a team of 300‑plus across Bengaluru, New York, and the UK, and plans to scale in the Americas, EMEA, and India as AI PC penetration rises.
On-device workflows are in limited release today and will broaden as compatible hardware becomes standard across enterprise fleets. That staged rollout acknowledges a practical constraint: reliable performance depends on modern NPUs and sufficient RAM, and many companies are still refreshing endpoints.
Competitive Context and Compliance Edge in Legal AI
The contract AI market is crowded, with CLM and negotiation tools from incumbents and startups alike. But on-device execution offers a differentiator against purely cloud models, particularly where firms demand zero data retention and strict data residency. Compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are easier to align with when sensitive drafts never traverse external infrastructure.
If SpotDraft can sustain near‑parity accuracy while delivering lower latency and stronger privacy guarantees, it can pull ahead in regulated sectors where AI adoption has been cautious. Qualcomm’s backing signals confidence that the endpoint, not just the data center, will be a decisive battleground for enterprise AI—and that contracts are a high‑value place to start.
