After the acquisition, he will remain at the startup as General Manager. AXDRAFT will continue to operate under the old brand name in the Ukrainian office. The team of 14 people will remain the same.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed, but according to Zaremba, it is a multimillion-dollar transaction. By the way, the startup was valued at $10 million in 2019.

About AXDRAFT

AXDRAFT is a SaaS legal document automation platform that covers the entire lifecycle of contracts, from the creation of drafts to editing, approving, and signing.

AXDRAFT helps lawyers and business teams minimize routine legal processes and speed up paperwork by 80 percent.

It took three years from inception to the sale of AXDRAFT.

“AXDRAFT’s development dynamics are the same as those of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley. In October 2017, Oleg and I started AXDRAFT. In December 2018, we got into Y Combinator, the best startup accelerator in the world. In April 2019, we raised $1.2 million in funding from leading investors in the Valley, and now, in December 2020, we completed the sale of AXDRAFT to Onit. We believe this is a big breakthrough not only for AXDRAFT but for the entire startup industry in Ukraine,” said Zaremba.

About Onit

The company Onit automates workflows for both legal and business teams. The company now has offices in the US, the UK, and New Zealand. Currently, it employs more than 300 people.

“AXDRAFT has created breakthrough technologies in the field of paperwork automation that will allow us to offer lightning-speed, error-free, and multilingual contract drafting. AXDRAFT will be an important part of Onit’s aggressive growth strategy,” commented Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit.

According to Oleg Zaremba, co-founder and CTO of AXDRAFT, Onit was attracted by a company’s unique document automation algorithm, which allows automating any document drafting in multiple languages and speed up the processing tenfold.

“We want to change the attitude toward Ukrainian legal and IT services worldwide. Despite significant progress, Ukrainian teams are still associated with a Post-Soviet mentality and outsourcing services. We want to raise the level of trust and change this attitude toward the Ukrainian IT industry so that when the leading investors hear about Ukrainian startups, they first of all think about high-quality products developed here,” comments Oleg.

Avodocs became the second legal-tech product on ProductHunt after Stripe Atlas, which got the most votes from users.

“We now have over 2,500 votes. In the overall ranking, this puts us among the top 300 launches in history, and there were several million. Number 1 is Startup Stash with 20,000+ votes,” said Yuriy Zaremba, the founder of AxDraft.

How did it benefit Avodocs?

After the launch, Avodocs added monetization and received several hundred dollars of new subscriptions in a week. However, according to Zaremba, the main advantage that gives the award on ProductHunt is traffic and early feedback. Besides, it allows attracting an international audience.

Avodocs was already published on ProductHunt in March 2019. And then, the team also noted a sharp increase in attendance.

“Two peaks on the screenshot are the first and second launch on ProducHunt. But the important thing is that after the first launch, the number of regular active users has increased sevenfold. This time we expect 2-3 times growth,” Zaremba comments.

That is not easy to become the Product of the Day/Week/Month. It depends not only on the quantity but also on the quality and dynamics of the project support by the audience.

“For example, last time we got the most votes, but we didn’t even enter the top 5. And this time, we corrected our mistakes and became the Product of the Day,” stressed AxDraft CEO.

This list includes:

1. Let’s Enhance – a service for processing images using neural networks.
2. Reply.io – a multichannel sales engagement platform that automates personal email outreach, calls, and tasks.
3. Legal Nodes – a marketplace where a founder or legal adviser of a tech company can find and contact a lawyer who best matches its legal needs.
4. Poptop – an online event planning marketplace that matches people planning events with suppliers.
5. Delfast – an electric bike manufacturer.
6. Animal ID – a service for animal identification.
7. Kray Technologies – a manufacturer of crop spraying drones.
8. Costless – a personal shopping assistant that helps you make smart decisions, save money, time, and energy. It provides agencies, brands, and retailers with real-time analytics, forecasts on price and consumption changes, and information on consumer behavior.
9. AxDraft – a legal-tech service for the automatic drafting of legal documents.
10. Effa is an ecological toothbrush, made of paper and environmentally friendly materials.
11. Pix – a manufacturer of the LED pixelized backpacks with a programmable screen.
12. Nuka – a producer of the “eternal” notebook and pencil.
13. CamTouch – a set that enables you to turn any flat surface into an interactive one and control it with a laser pointer or special stylus.
14. ActiveChat – a conversational AI platform with natural language understanding for customer support, e-commerce, and marketing chatbots.
15. ADAM – 3D bioprinting of organic bone structures.

“More than 50 startups, out of 160 applications received, are already ready to raise foreign investment and bring their products to new markets. The projects that were able to provide evidence of their profitability and vision of further development after the investment have reached the final,” says Kateryna Dehtyar, Startup Grind Kyiv Director.

The winners will receive tickets to the Startup Grind Global Conference 2020, booth, promo, PR support from the organizers, and covering logistics costs.

Who are investors

The deal is handled by FundersClub and their affiliate FCVC. SCM Advisors, an institutional investor, also participated in the round. Matt Macinnis (Inkling), Ragnar Sass (Pipedrive, Lift99), Nick Bilogorskiy and a couple of other angels from the Silicon Valley participated in the deal. The team closed the said round with valuation 7 times higher than the previous one three weeks after Demo Day in Y Combinator accelerator.

What do they do

AxDraft develops legal products for entrepreneurs and companies. AxDraft allows its clients to create a legal document by answering the key questions. You don’t have to prepare it from scratch. The program will generate the document based on available templates. The service is monetized through subscription.

Currently, the founders of the startup are in California. They are planning to use the money to expand the team and scale up in the U.S. market. For that, they need UI/UX designer and two sales managers with sales experience in the U.S.

In related news: AxDraft got into Y Combinator and received a $150,000 investment.

The startup has also introduced an updated AxDraft Business product. This is a free service that helps entrepreneurs draw up the necessary legal documents, for example, a contract or an acceptance report. The service was improved and then launched on the US market – new content was added to cater to the needs of American customers in AxDraft Business, which is available only there (IP address filtering). Also, a business model appeared, earlier it was only free.

“We provide free documents for startups in the US in a Do-It-Yourself model, because we don’t see the value in the document itself. If a startup wants to get a follow-up, advice or analysis of contractor’s comments with respect to our contract, it is possible to upload them to AxDraft and we will provide analysis at a fixed price (we are still experimenting with the price) in collaboration with lawyers who use AxDraft in their work,” Yuriy Zaremba, the AxDraft founder, explained for AIN.UA.

We can get a high margin at a low fixed price for services because all participants of the process work use AxDraft.

In Ukraine, this model of monetization has not yet been launched, it is still being tested. Content for Ukraine is focused on small businesses and is completely free. Earlier, the startup attracted investments with an estimate of 1.33 million euros from Overkill. At that time, Zaremba informed that the company’s founders moved to Silicon Valley and were engaged in product development in the United States.