5 minutes with Kanti Prabha, Co-founder & President, Sirion

Sirion’s goal is to simplify how legal, procurement, finance and sales teams can author, negotiate and sign compliant contracts with embedded risk control, while being guided by AI-led contract intelligence.

Hi Kanti, please introduce yourself and your role.

“I’m the Co-founder and President of Sirion, a pioneering contract lifecycle management (CLM) company that fuses large language models used by the likes of ChatGPT and best-in-class legal AI to revolutionise how contracts are created, negotiated, and managed. As a founding member on the executive team, I’m deeply involved in guiding the product’s evolution, leading research and development around legal AI, and exploring its many applications and use cases within the CLM domain.”

How did you come to co-found Sirion?

“After graduating with a degree in chemistry, I was leading a team of patent reviewers and working on developing techno-legal solutions for large enterprises at UnitedLex. That’s where I met Ajay Agrawal, and after working with him for a few years, he invited me to join him in launching Sirion. Our first customer was Hewlett-Packard (HP). They reached out to us after a large acquisition, asking us to find a technological solution that would enable HP to centrally store thousands of contracts. We rose to the occasion by developing our own platform; and as we did, we realised that a repository was just one piece of the contract management puzzle that so many large enterprises were struggling to solve. This idea inspired us to create Sirion, a true full-stack enterprise class CLM solution that not only enables businesses to store their contracts, but also create, negotiate, and manage the outcomes and value enshrined in them. 

“Today, Sirion is used by more than 250 of the world’s most valuable companies in 70+ countries, to manage 5mn+ contracts worth upwards of USD$450bn with a common goal: to build risk-free, value-driven, highly efficient contracts.”

Tell us about how contract lifecycle management impacts the manufacturing sector.

“Manufacturing operations today aren’t as simple as they used to be even 25 years ago. Supply chains have been stretching further and further in search of cost efficiency, fragmenting it into a delicately interconnected web of suppliers, subcontractors, and contract manufacturers. If we simply take the example of Apple’s iPhones for instance, suppliers in 43 countries and six continents work together to build them. And that’s just the production side of it. When we add distribution to the mix, it grows even more complex with businesses having to manage multi-country, multi-region deals, rebate structures, and more.

“Now, think of this on a global scale. Decentralised buy- and sell-side processes involving such a set of interdependent parts can lead to major discrepancies and several maverick operational silos within a single manufacturing value chain. The result: significant financial repercussions.

“This is the issue that Sirion CLM strives to solve. By creating a centralised, unified contracting process. CLM can standardise global processes, be it procurement or sales, both within the enterprise as well as across third-party partners. So, a manufacturer located in France, can rest assured that their sourcing plant in Shenzhen or their distribution hub in Johannesburg are controlled by a centrally enforced contracting process and risk playbook whenever they have to create, negotiate, sign or even renew an agreement. In addition, with a CLM in place, visibility across their sourcing and distribution chains to ensure that everything is in compliance with local and global regulatory policies.”

How does CLM help sales, procurement and vendors?

“When it comes to procurement, Sirion offers front-line, self-service contracting capabilities that allow enterprises to rapidly draft contract, act on supplier information, surface and remediate risks hidden in contracts, and significantly shorten the legal review cycle. But this is only where it begins. Sirion is uniquely designed to not just simplify the pre-signature stage of a contract but expand the scope of post-signature manageability of contracts. By mapping raw performance data extracted from the enterprise IT ecosystem, it allows procurement to defend revenue and realise hard savings to the tune of 6-12% at the invoice level.

“On the other hand, Sirion supports sales teams by cutting quote-to-contract time by as much as 80% and the reducing the complexities of cross-functional dependencies through self-service contract creation. Its AI-guided legal review capabilities help get the job done 90% faster, further saving enterprises’ time and effort. It also captures post-signature performance data, which can be used to lead account growth conversations. 

“Moreover, Sirion helps vendors outline clear deliverables and gain full visibility for all parties involved throughout the course of the contract lifecycle; subsequently enabling better delivery performance and stronger relationships.”

What do the next 12 months hold for you and the company?

“We’ve just finished setting up our UX Center of Excellence in France – which is expected to have a significant impact on Sirion’s usability – and we’re currently working on building out our AI R&D Center of Excellence in North America. The idea is to bring together the expertise and niche cognitive capabilities of Legal AI and the natural language processing power of the recently hyped large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

“At Sirion we believe that the future of contracting involves the combined power of these two distinct applications of AI. While LLMs have the cognition to understand and generate natural language, Legal AI can enrich this capability with legal expertise and contextual understanding of contract language. Bringing these together will pave the way towards the future of autonomous, fully computable contracting. This is what Sirion is working towards building.”