Artificial intelligence-powered contract and document compliance technology platform Document Crunch announced Oct. 9 it had raised $21.5 million in a series B funding round led by Titanium Ventures.
The round includes participation from strategic partner Nemetschek Group, along with major contractors such as Andres Construction and Satterfield & Pontikes, existing investors including Navitas Capital, Zacua Ventures, Fifth Wall and Ironspring Ventures. Document Crunch will also add Yash Patel, general partner at Titanium Ventures, to its board of directors.
"We have made major strides expanding our platform to support the day-to-day needs of project teams," says Josh Levy, the company's CEO and co-founder. "All of this momentum has clarified our vision and what the industry needs from us, and we intend to get much deeper into all the documents and project team workflows that cause risk for our industry."
Document Crunch raised a $9-million series A round of funding less than a year ago.
Launched in 2019, Document Crunch started as a contract review product for back-office legal and risk teams to identify risks during pre-construction and negotiation. Its first contract review product saw growth and adoption among general contractors, subcontractors and other construction stakeholders.
Using construction contract-specific LLMs and generative AI using frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the machine-learning algorithm has a purpose-built retrieval architecture designed to deliver answers to complex contractor questions about documents. It also has a chat feature to let users ask questions directly. Construction Contract Checklist and Project Playbook—tools specifically for personnel onsite such as foremen, project managers and project engineers—were launched in July.
Co-founder Levy—who was previously a contract review specialist at contractor JE Dunn and engineer Wood—and COO Trent Miskelly—formerly a founding executive at Assemble Systems and JBKnowledge—always were aiming to de-risk contract administration in the field as well as in the early stages.
To Titanium's Patel, it was Document Crunch's Project Playbook, which automates document review, that was most compelling.
"We found that the early adopters [of Project Playbook] were the legal staff that some of the larger GCs have, but some of the biggest drivers of usage of their software—when we looked at everything from weekly active users to monthly active users—all of those end users that were driving those high ratios were really project managers and engineers, the actual end users."
Levy says that developing products to help customers deal with the risk profile at any stage of a project are what Document Crunch will focus on with this latest round of funding. He also says adding an investor like Titanium, which invests in technologies beyond construction, was something Document Crunch wanted to do to expand its offerings. Patel says he sees owner and insurer and bonding opportunities for the technology platform.
"We see all sorts of situations that arise beyond these templatized, basic kind of contracts that some folks tend to work with," Patel says. Noting the "subtle nuances" that can find their way into contracts, he says, "Unless they've got the right legal staff on board—and only bigger ones do—the vast majority need to have a tool and AI is a great way to provide this and democratize it for the masses."
Both Levy and Patel say they were looking forward to expanding the platform, and Levy announced there will be more hires shortly.
"This growth capital is our commitment to the construction industry that we intend to de-risk every single project in our $13-trillion ecosystem." Levy says.