Ironclad hits $200m ARR mark – We interview CEO Dan Springer – Legal IT Insider

By Tom Saunders

Ironclad, the US-based CLM software provider, earlier in February announced that its annual recurring revenue has exceeded $200m – a rapid ascent from the $150m ARR figure the company achieved last year.

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The San Francisco-based company, valued at $3.2bn in its most recent fundraising in 2022, also announced a spate of leadership hires, including Herman Man from fintech Bluevine as chief product officer, Mingsheng Hong from Microsoft as vice-president of AI, and Alvin Dias, previously at Google, as vice-president of engineering (all pictured in our feature image above.)

“Contracts define how businesses operate, and AI is unlocking their full strategic value,” said Dan Springer, CEO (pictured right). “With this leadership team in place, we’re doubling down on trusted enterprise AI.”

In an interview with Legal IT Insider, Springer – who joined Ironclad in April 2025 from e-signature company Docusign – said that CLM, previously regarded as a “sleepy category” by investors, had “started to take off”, with a growth rate of 10%-15%. “Companies are realising that it’s the last part of the enterprise that hasn’t had a system of record,” he said.

Beyond this sectoral growth, Springer added, “we take a lot of business from existing traditional CLMs, where companies say, ‘We need a more modern program’.” Though Ironclad was founded over a decade ago, its early focus on being cloud-based and AI-compatible now give it a flexibility that appeals to clients, he said, citing current year-on-year ARR growth of just under 40%.

He does not see the rising generation of legal AI start-ups as a threat: they are, he said, “side by side with what we do on driving contracts”. Ironclad announced a strategic partnership with legal AI platform Harvey in August last year.

Of the recent hires – which also include last year’s recruitment of chief technology officer Sunita Verma, from roleplay platform Character.AI, and chief strategy and marketing officer Elise Bergeron, from data company Snowflake – Springer said they reflected the need for AI “to be the dominant aspect of our software development”. Customer feedback and constant improvements in underlying LLMs necessitate weekly updates of agentic tools such Ironclad’s Jurist, Springer said. “In an AI software world, you can’t do the old cycles,” he added. “It’s a very different pace.”

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