Ontra celebrates its 10th anniversary this October! What started out as three friends with a clever idea has grown into an industry-leading AI legal tech platform with 800+ customers, over 1.2 million documents processed, and 300+ employees.
We couldn’t be prouder of Ontra’s journey and the strides we’ve made in helping investment, legal, and compliance professionals streamline and automate repetitive tasks. Now they can spend their time on what matters most — whether that’s important work or getting home in time for dinner.
Ontra’s origins
CEO and founder Troy Pospisil formed the idea for Ontra — previously InCloudCounsel — while working in private equity investing. He loved the industry but saw the inefficiencies. The high volume of repetitive, mundane work. The generic legacy tech. The unnecessary late nights.
Troy knew that modern legal tech could be the solution. He partnered with his friend and Kirkland & Ellis lawyer, Ben Levi, to pursue combining a unique labor model with best-in-class technology with the intention of creating an end-to-end contract negotiation solution.
Along with their third, tech-focused co-founder, Lane Lillquist, the trio set out to build their first solution, Contract Automation — initially known as Document Processing.
Their vision was clear: Create a world where professionals have more time to focus on what is important to them. Customers would be free from time-consuming, manual tasks and able to better focus on high-value work, while lawyers could build practices free from traditional employment and geographic constraints.
When it came time to sell their unique solution to customers, Troy slept on friends’ couches, stamped hundreds of envelopes, and walked miles across NYC to book meetings. It was a labor of love, sweat, and tears that paid off when Ontra celebrated processing 1,000,000 documents a decade later.
Growth of Ontra’s private markets technology platform
Ontra’s ever-expanding private markets technology platform addresses the full spectrum of legal workflows required to fundraise, invest, and operate funds. Through a combination of purpose-built applications, a proprietary AI engine leveraging leading LLMs, and a global Legal Network, Ontra provides more than 800 customers with innovative solutions backed by years of industry expertise.
Contract Automation
Customers leverage Ontra’s AI-powered platform and a global network of independent law firms to automate and streamline processes related to contract intake, negotiation, and execution.
Contract Automation has evolved significantly since the early days of Document Processing. We continue to expand contract types, from NDAs to vendor agreements and LP transfers. Our customers’ lawyers now use digital playbooks, our proprietary AI redlining tool, Markup Builder, and a centralized solution with automated notifications to speed up negotiations. Our AI and GPT-4 integration continue to boost AI-powered features, from markup suggestions to quickly summarizing executed agreements.
Over 700 firms trust Contract Automation, including Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Carlyle, and Fir Tree Partners. Learn more about how Blackstone closes high-caliber investments faster, and Fir Tree cut negotiation times in half with Ontra.
Insight
Throughout the first six years, Ontra grew to over 50 employees and 300 customers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The business developed close relationships with private fund managers and asset managers and, through these close ties, Ontra discovered growing pain points around side letter management and compliance. Firms had too many side letters and obligations to effectively track in a spreadsheet. The team at Ontraset out to build another solution.
With Insight, customers leverage AI to digitize their LPAs and side letters and create a central repository. They now have a searchable, digital compendia containing all of their categorized obligations and where they can assign tasks and pull reports to support their compliance efforts. We are continually adding to Insight’s features, such as the recent additions of digital MFN elections and AI Search.
Leading managers worldwide, including Blackstone, Battery Ventures, AllianceBernstein, Silverlake, L Catterton, and Pharos Capital Group, rely on Insight. Learn how Pharos accelerated their SEC exam response with Insight’s search and reporting capabilities.
Atlas
Ontra’s most recently launched product modernizes legal entity management to automate Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) filings and other compliance workflows. Once again, Ontra’s growing team focused on a solution that would specifically address our customers’ legal and compliance needs.
One Equity Partners, Glendower Capital, Ridgemont Equity Partners, and more rely on Atlas to manage their entity information in a single AI-enabled platform, generate customizable structure charts, and automate CTA filings.
Synapse
Ontra’s AI engine, Synapse, is a cutting-edge combination of proprietary models and third-party LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Synapse:
- Is safe and secure: Customer data is carefully guarded and not used to train third-party models.
- Is designed for private markets: Purpose-built for private market contracts and workflows.
- Generates customer-specific results: Data is fetched in real time for quick and relevant results.
- Relies on a human-in-the-loop model: Dedicated professionals review AI-generated results.
Our industry-leading AI provides solutions to solve our customers’ unique and complex problems. Synapse enables us to deploy reliable AI features throughout our platform, speeding up legal tasks across the fund lifecycle, lowering costs, and empowering professionals with immediate knowledge of their contracts and obligations.
The Legal Network
Our global network of independent legal professionals is a key part of our human-in-the-loop philosophy. While AI and legal tech have advanced significantly in the last year — and even recent months — neither can take the place of legal professionals’ insight and judgment.
Our Legal Network features more than 600 legal professionals, giving our customers access to human insight in addition to our AI-powered solutions.
Timeline: Ontra through the years
- 2014-17: InCloudCounsel launches its Contract Automation solution and opens three offices across the U.S.
- 2016: InCloudCounsel adds proprietary machine learning to Contract Automation.
- 2018: InCloudCounsel opens a London office.
- 2019: InCloudCounsel completes a $40M Series A fundraise with Battery Ventures and opens an office in Asia.
- 2020: InCloudCounsel grows beyond 50 employees and reaches 300 customers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
- 2021: InCloudCounsel rebrands as Ontra, goes to market with Insight, launches its philanthropic program, The Legal Aid Alliance, and completes a $200M Series B fundraise with Blackstone Growth.
- 2022: Ontra makes two business acquisitions, grows to over 300 employees, and reaches 500 customers.
- 2023: Ontra launches Atlas, integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4 into Synapse, and expands The Legal Aid Alliance to Europe and Asia-Pacific.
- 2024: Ontra reaches over 1 million contracts processed through its solutions and celebrates 10 years.
Closing the justice gap
Many Ontra employees were practicing lawyers in their previous lives and understand the chasm between the need for legal representation and the legal resources available for vulnerable and low-income communities. Ontra believes in playing a part in closing what’s known as “the justice gap.”
We donate $1 for every document processed through our solutions. In 2023, we donated $292,903 — our highest annual amount to date. It was our first year including documents processed through Insight and the first year we gave our customers the option of Ontra donating an additional sum rather than sending a traditional holiday gift.
In three years, Ontra’s Legal Aid Alliance has donated over $572,000 to legal aid nonprofits across the U.S.
Looking to the future of AI legal tech
Ontra has never strayed from the original vision: To create a world where professionals have more time to focus on what is important to them.
We will continue to expand our solutions and help our private markets customers by leveraging our purpose-built AI, the world’s leading LLMs, and our unique industry expertise.
If we’ve sparked your interest in Ontra, reach out here! We work with leading investment banks, private equity and venture capital firms, direct lenders, law firms, and service providers, and we’re always happy to foster new connections.
