Polish startup Pergamin, which automates contract management in companies, has gained a strategic investor. OnDean Forward has invested €2.6 million in the Polish company. The capital and active support will help Pergamin build a regional leader and a global platform.
Pergamin streamlines and secures contract management in medium and large companies by automating contract creation, facilitating negotiations, speeding up signing, and increasing the security of critical business document processing. The tech company uses a unique approach where the contract becomes a database. It enables the exchange of information between the platform and other systems that store data, for example, about employees and employment, as well as clients and orders.
The company is particularly focused on improving the handling of employee contracts by offering companies its Employee Contract Platform. It automates and speeds up contract signing and ongoing updating of employment contracts, and streamlines the necessary paperwork for tax offices and social security institutions. Pergamin estimates that in Poland alone manual and often paper-based processes related to employee legal contract management cost medium and large companies up to EUR 700 million annually.
The company was founded in 2017 by Jakub Barwaniec, Piotr Łuczak, and Antoni Wędzikowski. To date, Pergamin has acquired over 130 paying clients, ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to international corporations. They have 120,000+ registered users and ~400,000 processed contracts. Among Pergamin’s clients are Bolt, Heimstaden, Renault Trucks, Toyota Material Handling, Vienna Insurance Group, Volvo Financial Services, Volvo Trucks, and Westwing.
“Creating, negotiating, signing, and then storing contracts is a headache for every company. In the case of employee contracts, there are also a number of additional documents required by law. Manual handling of contracts in Polish companies costs hundreds of millions of euros each year and significantly burdens HR teams and administrative departments. Pergamin allows you to significantly speed up the process from preparation to signing, enhance the security, and ensure smooth data exchange with other IT systems. When it comes to employment contracts, Pergamin accelerates the whole process by 10x while reducing preparation costs by 75 percent and recovering two-thirds of each HR manager’s workload,” said Jakub Barwaniec, co-founder and CEO of Pergamin.
With the support of OnDean Forward and its investment, Pergamin aims to build a global contract automation platform. The new strategic investor will assist the company in product development and extending its reach within Poland and to new markets.
“Legaltech in the US is a fast-growing industry, and digital contract management solutions are already critical for the largest global corporations. This trend is also happening in Europe, but in Europe the word processor and printer still play a leading role. Pergamin has a real potential to change this. We intend to leverage our experience from growing Relativity and from investing in the American legaltech ecosystem to help Pergamin deliver on this promise. We believe that Pergamin will quickly become a leader in our country and in the region, and then a global player,” added Marcin Wojtczak, a new investor in Pergamin.
OnDean Forward was founded by Andrew Sieja and Marcin Wojtczak. The fund has already invested in 5 American legaltech companies. Pergamin is their first direct investment outside the US. Prior to Ondean Forward, Andrew founded Relativity in Chicago and developed its products as CEO for nearly 20 years, while Marcin served as Chief Growth Officer. Relativity develops software for data organization and analysis, as well as eDiscovery. The platform has over 300,000 users from 40 countries, including 198 of the 200 largest law firms in the USA.
The latest funding round increases the total value of financing obtained by Pergamin from investors to approximately $5 million. The capital for the Polish company has been previously provided by Sunfish Partners, DFRI, FundingBox, JR Holding, and Nunatak Capital.
