Prior to co-founding DiligenceEngine, I was an M&A lawyer at a leading New York City firm. I did due diligence contract review myself, I supervised due diligence, and I spoke with people at other firms who did and supervised due diligence. Based on this experience, I realized there was a better way to do due diligence contract review, got together with Alex (who has a PhD in computer science from a leading program), and we set to work under the “DiligenceEngine” banner. “DiligenceEngine” perfectly fit what we were building: our software helped lawyers do due diligence contract review faster and more accurately. We have seen real use of our system as a diligence tool:
- Our system has been used on over $70 billion of M&A transactions so far, by a number of really excellent firms and companies.
- We’ve regularly seen customer tests finding more accurate contract review in 20–60% less time.
- Serious M&A lawyers who know our system well have called it “the future for document review,” “at the forefront of the technological revolution that will shape future deal-doing,” and more along those lines.
While we initially built DiligenceEngine to help with due diligence contract review, we came to realize that lots of people—many of them non-lawyers—review contracts for many things beyond what our system covered. But we had not really built a system that found change of control or non-solicitiation clauses: our system learned to find what it was taught. And it could be taught to find new information that was relevant to people with other contract metadata extraction problems.
This past summer, we beta launched a new feature that allowed users to teach our system to find whatever they chose. We call it Quick Study. It was a hit right away. Since this limited launch, our customers have already built close to 1,000 provisions using it. They have transformed their versions of our system into something very different than a due diligence tool.
We see a lot more use like this in our system’s future. To that end, we’ve been getting in on the action ourselves, leveraging experienced lawyers to build out new modules for contract management and real estate. We all love the name DiligenceEngine, and have seen real success with it. But with so much non-diligence use and revenue, it doesn’t suit our company any more. As such, we’ve renamed our company Kira. Kira means “ray of light.” It is a fitting name for us because our system helps people see and understand what’s in their contracts.
Along with the new name, we have a new logo and website. The website has a lot of detail. Check it out!
The “DiligenceEngine” name will continue as part of our M&A due diligence product name, “Kira Diligence Engine.” We remain very committed to the M&A market, and have big news coming here soon.
We couldn’t be more excited about becoming Kira, as well as the transformation underlying it. Contract review can be done better, and we’re here to help.