A Philadelphia serial founder has raised a $4.5 million seed round for his latest venture, a document processing startup.
Common Paper is Jake Stein’s third company. Stein was one of the brains behind business intelligence and data analytics startup RJMetrics and its spinout Stitch, both of which were co-founded with Crossbeam CEO Bob Moore. RJMetrics and Stitch were both acquired, and Stein spent 2018 to 2020 working for Stitch’s parent company, Talend.
Boldstart Ventures and Uncork Capital led the round in Common Paper. Angel investors Henry Ward, CEO of Carta; Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath; and TechGC co-founders Greg Raiten and Kiran Lingam also participated.
Boldstart and Uncork previously funded RJMetrics and Stitch.
Stein started Common Paper with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ben Garvey in 2021 after finding the process of putting together contracts with customers at Stitch to be a “tremendous pain.”
Common Paper builds open source “industry-standard” contracts written by attorneys and provides a cloud-based platform to make the documents easier to work with. The platform lets users build contract templates, negotiate terms, sign contracts and keep track of which agreements were signed.
The startup’s first standardized contract is a non-disclosure agreement, and Common Paper is also creating standardized contracts around buying and selling software as a service and cloud service products.
“Contracts, which started as ink on paper, they have moved online, but we’re still managing them the same way,” Stein said. “What they ought to be, our vision for the future, is that those contracts should actually function as APIs.”
Standardized contracts have been around for some time, and Common Paper aim to set itself apart from competitors like DocuSign by coupling its contracts with software that works with those contracts to make them easier to read, negotiate and complete, Stein said.
The startup will use the funding to capitalize on the growing enterprise software industry. Enterprise software spending is expected to reach $672 billion in 2022, up 11% from $605 billion in 2021, according to Statista. The market is estimated to hit $752 billion in 2023.
Common Paper’s target markets are technology startups and companies that buy and sell enterprise technology for its product, Stein said.
“I'm sure you've heard the term ‘time kills all deals,’” he said. “So if we can dramatically accelerate, make more efficient and reduce risk for the $650 billion a year industry, we think there's a really big opportunity for us to build a substantial business here.”
The seed funding will also be used to hire more employees in research and development, as well as to hire more attorneys to help design standard contracts, with a goal to double the team by the end of 2022. Common Paper has eight employees, with half of them based in the Philadelphia area and the rest distributed throughout the U.S.
Common Paper isn’t the only local document-centered startup to be raising growth capital. Passthrough, which is building out a platform designed to make investing in private markets as simple as retail trading through document simplification, recently raised a $5 million seed round.
