Shashank Bijapur

Shashank Bijapur is co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, an AI contract lifecycle platform. A Harvard Law graduate who practiced at White & Case, he started the company after watching self-driving car demos while still copy-pasting clauses by hand.

BigLaw absurdity as founding spark

SpotDraft's about page tells the 2017 origin plainly: technology was leaping ahead elsewhere while contract management stayed archaic. Bijapur partnered with Carnegie Mellon-trained Madhav Bhagat to build software that covers drafting, redlining, clickwrap, e-sign, and repositories for modern legal teams.

Series A and global CLM

In 2023 SpotDraft raised a $26M Series A led by Premji Invest, with Prosus and others participating. Bijapur's public comments frame the product as end-to-end automation for companies that live on third-party paper, not only generating first drafts. Expansion has pushed the company across the US, India, and other markets.

On freeing lawyers for judgment work

He describes the mission as unlocking lawyers from mundane tasks so they can do higher-judgment work. That operator-lawyer voice - Harvard Law, White & Case, then SaaS CEO - is unusual in AI tooling and shows up in how SpotDraft sells to legal buyers.