Startup Deep Dive : Icertis — the contract software company now worth $5 billion

Icertis has never sold anything anyone finds exciting: contracts, the dullest documents in a company’s filing cabinet. That has not stopped it from building a business approaching $350 million in annual recurring revenue and a valuation of about $5 billion, reached in 2021 and reportedly still intact as it explores a sale five years later.

Here is the contradiction the rest of this piece works through. A company built almost entirely around the discipline and continuity of one co-founder’s sixteen-year tenure spent the last thirteen months losing that continuity altogether: Samir Bodas stepped back from the CEO role in August 2025, died of cancer in January 2026, and by July 2026 his handpicked successor had also left, replaced by two interim co-chief executives while the board searched for a permanent one. A business selling discipline to Fortune 100 boardrooms was, at the same time, short of exactly that at the top.

Quick facts

What they do

Icertis sells software that manages a contract from the moment it is drafted to the moment it expires or renews: authoring the clauses, routing it through negotiation and approval, tracking the obligations buried inside it once it is signed, flagging compliance risk, and surfacing renewal dates before anyone forgets them. The company calls its platform “Icertis Contract Intelligence” and, more recently, markets an AI layer on top of it under the Vera AI name, aimed at reading and reasoning over contract language rather than merely storing it. Its customer is not a small business signing the occasional vendor agreement; it is a large multinational with tens of thousands of live contracts spread across legal, procurement, sales and HR, the kind of buyer that can justify a sales cycle running six to twelve months, as estimated by the research firm Sacra. Icertis says its platform now supports more than one-third of the Fortune 100 and about one in five companies on the Fortune Global 500, and past company disclosures have put the volume running through the platform above ten million contracts across more than ninety countries. Named customers cited in company and press material include Microsoft, Daimler, Porsche, Sanofi, Red Bull, Cognizant, BMW and McDonald’s, the last two added in 2025.

The origin

Icertis was founded in 2009 by Samir Bodas and Monish Darda, and neither man fits the usual founder profile of someone dropping out of college with an idea. Bodas, who had emigrated from Pune to the United States in 1982 and studied at the University of Texas at Austin and the Wharton School, had already worked at National Instruments and Microsoft and then run Aztecsoft as chief executive until it was acquired by Mindtree. Darda had founded several earlier ventures and had led the India engineering operation of Bladelogic, an IT-automation company later bought by BMC Software. Both were in their forties by the time they started Icertis, backing a specific, unglamorous bet: that contracts, which every large company signs by the tens of thousands and almost none of them manage systematically, were an overlooked category of enterprise software waiting for a cloud-era rewrite. The company’s name comes from the Latin word “certa”, meaning trustworthy or certain, a name Bodas’s wife is said to have suggested during a family holiday in South Africa. Icertis began life not as the specialist product company it later became but as a custom software and IT-services outfit, and it found an early, credibility-building customer in Microsoft, brought in around 2010-11 while Microsoft’s own cloud platform was still an internal project known as “Red Dog”, years before it launched publicly as Azure.

The struggle years

The first hard decision was to stop being a general-purpose services company. Building custom software for whoever would pay meant a fragmented customer base, thin margins and no product to point to, so by 2012 Bodas and Darda pivoted Icertis into a pure-play software company focused only on contract lifecycle management, walking away from other revenue in the process. That decision alone did not produce fast growth: by 2013 Icertis was still a fifty-person company with only four or five Fortune 100 customers, Microsoft chief among them, according to an account published by Outlook Business. Founders later described reaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue, in 2014-15, as the single biggest struggle of the company’s early life, a milestone that looks small in hindsight next to a $5 billion valuation but took years of unglamorous enterprise sales work to reach, as reported by Forbes India.

The other near-death moment was internal rather than commercial. Around 2012-13, with the CLM product still being built, Darda and Bodas clashed over which technology to build the user interface on. Darda, as chief technology officer, wanted Microsoft Silverlight, betting it would let the small team ship a polished interface faster. Bodas overruled him, insisting on technology that would run in any browser rather than lock Icertis into a single vendor’s plug-in. The two founders say they resolved the disagreement by asking customers directly what they cared about, and the answer was usability, not the technology underneath it, according to an account both founders later gave to Outlook Business. Microsoft ended support for Silverlight altogether in October 2021, effectively retiring the technology Darda had originally wanted, nearly a decade after Icertis chose not to build on it.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point on the company’s own timeline is June 2019, when Icertis closed a $115 million Series E round that pushed its valuation past $1 billion for the first time, a threshold that, per Forbes India’s account of the company’s history, arrived only after revenue had climbed from roughly $1 million in 2014-15 to around $10 million by 2017. Reaching a $1 billion valuation did not just add a headline; it changed the size of check Icertis could raise and the speed at which it could raise it. Revenue reportedly crossed $100 million by the middle of 2020, and Zinnov’s estimates cited by Forbes India put 2021 revenue in the $150-175 million range. Within roughly eighteen months of the 2019 round, Icertis raised an $80 million Series F in March 2021 that valued it at more than $2.8 billion, and by the final quarter of that year SoftBank’s Vision Fund II had bought into the company at a valuation of about $5 billion, according to Bloomberg and PitchBook reporting from November 2021 — a fivefold jump in roughly two and a half years that the earlier, harder-won $1 billion mark had made possible.

The money behind it

Icertis built its capital base in stages rather than in one dramatic raise. Early institutional money came from Greycroft and Fidelity’s India-focused arm, Eight Roads Ventures, starting with a small round in 2015 that funded the shift to a pure CLM product. B Capital Group joined by 2017 and stayed through every subsequent round into 2021, while PSP Partners came in from 2018. A $50 million Series D in 2018 and a $115 million Series E in June 2019, the round that made Icertis a unicorn, were followed by an $80 million Series F in March 2021 at a $2.8 billion valuation, led by B Capital. Later that year, SoftBank Vision Fund II bought a stake, reportedly from Eight Roads Ventures, that valued the company at roughly $5 billion, according to Bloomberg and PitchBook. In January 2022, SAP took an undisclosed minority stake of its own and turned the relationship into a distribution channel, elevating Icertis to “Endorsed App” status inside SAP Ariba and SAP Customer Experience, giving Icertis a route into SAP’s own enterprise customer base rather than only competing for the same budgets. Icertis has also used debt: a $150 million convertible note from Silicon Valley Bank in October 2022 and a $50 million debt paydown reported in 2025, per data aggregated by Sacra. Total funding is reported at different figures by different trackers — Sacra puts it above $520 million through 2025, while Zoominfo’s aggregation puts it at $571.5 million across thirteen rounds — a gap that reflects how differently third-party trackers count debt and secondary transactions for a company that discloses little of this itself. Of the backers involved, three changed the trajectory most visibly: Greycroft and Eight Roads supplied the earliest institutional conviction behind the CLM-only pivot; B Capital Group’s growth capital, deployed across four rounds, funded the multi-year push up-market into Fortune 500 accounts; and SAP’s 2022 investment converted a co-opetition risk into a sales channel that still supplies new customers today.

How it makes money

Icertis runs a subscription model priced on a mix of named users and contract volume, according to Sacra’s analysis of the business, rather than a flat per-seat fee. Because its buyers are large enterprises with thousands of contracts and long procurement cycles, average contract values are reported by Sacra to run in the $1.1 million to $1.4 million range per customer, and estimated gross margins sit in the 70-80% band typical of enterprise SaaS once a customer is implemented. The part people most often get wrong is assuming Icertis competes with e-signature and document-storage tools such as DocuSign; it does not sell a way to sign a PDF, it sells structured data extracted from the contract itself, which is why the company positions contracts as what it calls a “fifth system of record” alongside ERP, CRM, HCM and supply-chain systems, a framing the company itself uses in its marketing. The newer AI layer, sold under the Vera AI name and expanded through the 2025 acquisition of Dioptra, is priced and reported separately: Icertis said in 2026 that AI annual recurring revenue grew nearly 40% year-over-year, faster than the company overall, though the base CLM subscription remains the larger share of total revenue and the AI products are, for now, an accelerant layered on top of it rather than a replacement for it.

The numbers

Icertis is privately held and does not publish audited revenue or profit figures. What exists instead is a trail of self-reported and estimated annual recurring revenue milestones, gathered from company announcements and from Zinnov estimates cited by Forbes India, spanning more than a decade rather than consecutive fiscal years. No profit or loss figure for any period has ever been made public.

Read across those five points, growth looks steady rather than explosive in the most recent stretch: annual recurring revenue roughly doubled between 2021 and 2024, a slower multiple than the tenfold jump from 2017 to mid-2020. That is consistent with a company selling into an already-large base of Fortune 100 accounts, where growth increasingly comes from expanding existing contracts rather than from a fast-growing pool of brand-new customers.

Where the money comes from

Icertis does not break out revenue by geography or product line in public disclosures, so no verified segment split can be built from company filings the way it could be for a listed company. What can be verified is a workforce and customer geography: as of 2021, roughly 60% of the company’s approximately 1,700 employees were based in India, mostly in Pune, with 25-30% in the United States and the remainder across Europe and other regions, according to Forbes India’s reporting, even though the great majority of revenue is understood to originate from customers in North America and Europe. On the customer side, the company says it now serves more than a third of the Fortune 100 and one in five Fortune Global 500 businesses, and in 2025 it added nine new Fortune-ranked customers including BMW and McDonald’s. The more surprising split is by vertical rather than geography: while Icertis markets itself heavily around AI, its own 2026 disclosures show public-sector business growing more than 80% year-over-year in 2025, faster than the AI product line’s near-40% growth, and the company opened a dedicated public-sector office in Reston, Virginia, expected in the second quarter of 2026. A company built and marketed around artificial intelligence is, by its own numbers, growing fastest for now in government contracting, a considerably less glamorous line of business.

The risks

The most immediate risk is at the top of the company rather than in its product. Samir Bodas led Icertis as chief executive for sixteen years before moving to executive chairman in August 2025 to focus on his health, and he died in January 2026. His successor, Anand Subbaraman, lasted less than a year in the role before departing in July 2026, with the company naming its chief financial officer Rajat Bahri and board member Jim Moffatt as interim co-chief executives while it searches for a permanent one. That degree of churn at the top, three different leadership arrangements inside thirteen months, is unusual for a company simultaneously reported to be exploring a sale of up to $5 billion with Goldman Sachs as adviser, a process where continuity in leadership ordinarily reassures prospective buyers rather than unsettling them.

The second risk is concentration in a small number of very large accounts. Icertis has built its business around Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 customers with sales cycles of six to twelve months, per Sacra, which means growth depends heavily on a limited pool of enterprises renewing and expanding rather than on a broad base of smaller customers replacing any one lost account. The company’s own 2025 disclosure that more than half of existing customers expanded their contracts that year is a sign of healthy retention, but it also means a large share of stated growth is arithmetic on an existing base rather than genuinely new revenue.

The third risk sits inside the SAP relationship that has otherwise helped Icertis. SAP is both a minority shareholder, since January 2022, and the maker of competing enterprise software into which Icertis’s product is now deeply integrated as an “Endorsed App”. That arrangement currently functions as a sales channel, but it leaves Icertis exposed if SAP ever chooses to build or acquire native contract-management functionality of its own rather than continue routing customers to a company it merely holds a minority stake in.

The takeaway

Icertis spent more than a decade proving that an unglamorous, back-office software category can still support a multi-billion-dollar business, if a company is willing to give up breadth for depth: dropping general IT services for one product, dropping a broad customer base for a small number of Fortune 500 whales, and taking years to earn each order-of-magnitude jump in revenue. The same discipline that built the $5 billion valuation, however, was concentrated in one founder’s judgment for sixteen years, and the year after that founder stepped back showed how quickly an enterprise software company’s outward stability can be tested once its steadiest hand is gone. Durable revenue and durable leadership are not the same asset, and a company can have plenty of the first while visibly running short of the second.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Icertis, and when?

Icertis was founded in 2009 in Bellevue, Washington, by Samir Bodas and Monish Darda. Bodas had previously run Aztecsoft, and Darda had led engineering for Bladelogic in India before founding several earlier ventures.

What does Icertis actually do?

It sells contract lifecycle management software that helps large enterprises draft, negotiate, track and renew contracts, plus a newer AI layer, Vera AI, that reads and reasons over contract language. It says it supports more than a third of the Fortune 100 and about one in five Fortune Global 500 companies.

How much is Icertis worth?

SoftBank Vision Fund II invested at a roughly $5 billion valuation in late 2021, according to Bloomberg and PitchBook. As of February 2026, Bloomberg reported Icertis was exploring a sale, with Goldman Sachs advising, at a similar valuation of up to $5 billion, though no transaction had been confirmed.

Is Icertis profitable?

Icertis is privately held and has never published audited profit or loss figures. It reports annual recurring revenue instead, stating it was approaching $350 million as of August 2025, up from $300 million at the end of 2024.

Who runs Icertis now?

Co-founder Samir Bodas led the company as CEO until August 2025, then as executive chairman until his death in January 2026. His successor as CEO, Anand Subbaraman, departed in July 2026 after less than a year in the role. Since then, chief financial officer Rajat Bahri and board member Jim Moffatt have served as interim co-CEOs while the board searches for a permanent chief executive.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026.

• Wikipedia, “Icertis” (company overview and funding history), accessed September 2026
• Icertis, “Icertis CEO Samir Bodas to Become Executive Chairman; Chief Operating Officer Anand Subbaraman Appointed as CEO” (company newsroom), August 2025
• Icertis, “Icertis Announces the Passing of Co-Founder Samir Bodas” (company newsroom), January 2026
• Hoodline, “Bellevue Tech Trailblazer Samir Bodas Dies At 61 After Cancer Fight”, February 2026
• YourStory, “Icertis co-founder Samir Bodas passes away”, January 2026
• GeekWire, “Samir Bodas, 1964-2026: Icertis leader put personal values at the center of company culture”, February 2026
• Forbes India, “They built the foundation for business contracts. Now Icertis is in the driver’s seat of the next revolution” (SaaS Rising series), 2022
• Outlook Business, “Face-Off That Almost Killed Icertis”, accessed September 2026
• Bloomberg, “SoftBank Said to Near Icertis Stake Deal at $5 Billion Valuation”, November 2021
• PitchBook, “Icertis eyes $5B valuation”, November 2021
• Bloomberg (via Angel One), “SoftBank Backed Icertis Explores Potential $5 Billion Sale with Goldman Sachs”, February 2026
• MarketScreener, “SoftBank-Backed Icertis is Said to Work With Goldman on Potential $5 Billion Sale”, February 2026
• GeekWire, “SAP invests in contract management software startup Icertis, following recent SoftBank investment”, January 2022
• Spend Matters, “SAP deepens partnership with Icertis, taking a stake in CLM specialist”, January 2022
• Sacra, “Icertis revenue, valuation & funding”, accessed September 2026
• Icertis, “Generative AI Contracting Copilots Drive Icertis Above $250 Million in Annual Recurring Revenue” (company newsroom), 2024
• Icertis, “Icertis Reports Record Year of New Business Growth” (company newsroom), 2026
• Icertis, “Financial Times Names Icertis One of the Fastest Growing Companies in the Americas for 2026” (company newsroom), 2026
• GeekWire, “Icertis CEO is departing; contract management company names CFO and board member interim leaders”, July 2026
• citybiz, “Icertis Appoints Rajat Bahri and Jim Moffatt Interim Co-CEOs”, July 2026
• Icertis, “Icertis Announces CEO Transition” (company newsroom / BusinessWire), July 2026
• Tracxn, “Icertis – 2026 Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors”, accessed September 2026
• Zoominfo, “Icertis Funding: How Much Did They Raise & Key Investors”, accessed September 2026

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