In January 2023, SirionLabs closed a $25 million top-up to its Series D, taking the round to $110 million (GeekWire, January 2023). Twelve days later, it laid off around 130 people, roughly 15% of its workforce (Inc42, January 2023). The company that told investors it was scaling was, in the same month, telling employees it was cutting.
Three years on, that contradiction reads as the hinge of the story. Sirion, as the Gurugram-founded contract lifecycle management (CLM) company now calls itself, has gone on to grow revenue at close to 40-50% a year, turn profitable, and in February 2026 hand majority control to the US private equity firm Haveli Investments in a deal that valued the whole company at around $1 billion (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026; LawNext, February 2026) — the same billion-dollar mark it had already touched in mid-2024 (TechCrunch, June 2024). The pivot forced by that January 2023 layoff, not the funding round that preceded it, is what got it there.
Quick facts
| Company | Sirion (formerly SirionLabs); India entity Sirion Labs Private Limited, CIN U72900DL2012PTC242048 |
| Founded | Incorporated 11 September 2012, New Delhi; product launched December 2014 (RoC filing via Tofler; Inc42, 2016) |
| Founder(s) | Ajay Agrawal, Claude Marais, Kanti Prabha, Aditya Gupta |
| Businesses | AI-native contract lifecycle management (CLM) SaaS platform, SirionOne, plus document-AI and contract-repository add-ons from acquisitions |
| Latest FY revenue | India entity: ₹100–500 crore band for FY ended 31 March 2024, per RoC filing (Tofler); revenue rose roughly 50% year-on-year in FY25 (DealStreetAsia, reported 2026) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | India entity loss widened again in FY25 despite the revenue jump, after narrowing in FY24 (DealStreetAsia, 2024 and 2026 reports); globally, the company says it is now profitable (Ajay Agrawal, quoted by LawNext, February 2026) |
| Listed | Private |
| Market value / last valuation | Around $1 billion (₹9,600 crore at $1≈₹96.0) as of the Haveli Investments deal, January–February 2026 (Reuters/Yahoo Finance; LawNext); also reported at ~$1 billion in June 2024 (TechCrunch) |
| Key shareholders or CEO | Ajay Agrawal, Founder and CEO; Haveli Investments holds a majority stake (up to 90%, per Reuters) since February 2026; Peak XV Partners remains invested |
What they do
Sirion sells software that large enterprises use to draft, negotiate, store and police their commercial contracts after signature — the part of the contracting process that document-signing tools such as DocuSign do not touch. Its platform, SirionOne, reads a company’s existing contracts with AI, extracts obligations, deadlines, pricing terms and risk clauses, and then tracks whether counterparties are actually honouring them. The buyers are large, contract-heavy organisations — telecoms, banks, insurers, industrials, airlines and public-sector bodies — with legal, procurement and vendor-management teams that between them oversee thousands of supplier and customer agreements. As of January 2026, the company said it served hundreds of enterprises across more than 70 countries (Artificial Lawyer, January 2026), a customer base that traces back to a single account, Western Union, signed within a year of launch in the mid-2010s (Inc42, 2016).
The origin
Ajay Agrawal did not start in software. He trained as a lawyer, worked as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Debevoise & Plimpton, and in 2006 co-founded UnitedLex, a legal process outsourcing firm that grew to more than $100 million in enterprise value within four years (Inc42, 2016). Running UnitedLex meant watching, from the inside, how badly large companies managed the commercial contracts they signed with outsourcing and IT vendors: obligations went untracked, pricing terms were missed, and value leaked out of deals long after the ink dried. Agrawal’s own estimate, drawn from that work, was that 8–12% of the annual value of a typical strategic contract disappeared this way on the buy side (Inc42, 2016). His team at UnitedLex had already been building small internal tools to automate pieces of that governance work for clients; Agrawal’s insight was to turn that internal tooling into a standalone product rather than a service line.
He recruited Claude Marais, the former global head of outsourcing at General Motors, who had lived the same problem from the buyer’s chair, along with two colleagues from the UnitedLex engagement team, Kanti Prabha and Aditya Gupta. Sirion Labs Private Limited was incorporated in New Delhi on 11 September 2012 (RoC filing, via Tofler). Rather than building first and selling later, the founders spent roughly six months running a collaborative design exercise with about 30 Fortune 500 companies, including British Telecom, BP and Google, to freeze what the product actually needed to do before writing code, with development starting in May 2013 (Inc42, 2016). The platform went live in December 2014, and Western Union became its first paying customer within the year (Inc42, 2016).
The struggle years
The company’s first hard problem was not the product but the people. Agrawal later described the difficulty of finding engineers in India in 2012 who were both technically strong and willing to commit to an unproven product bet, and of pushing a services-minded UnitedLex culture — built around custom client delivery — into the very different discipline of building a single, modular product that had to work the same way for every customer (Inc42, 2016). Sirion was also selling into domains, such as performance auditing and invoice analytics, that its own founding team had to learn from scratch rather than having walked in the door as experts.
The louder crisis came a decade later, and it was self-inflicted by growth rather than by failure. Sirion had raised aggressively through 2019 and 2022 — a $44 million Series C led by Tiger Global Management and Avatar Growth Capital, reported in 2020 (Entrackr, May 2020; Inc42, 2020), and an $85 million Series D led by Partners Group with Tiger Global, Avatar Growth Capital and Peak XV Partners in April 2022 (TechCrunch, May 2022) — and had used some of that capital to acquire the Seattle-based contract-repository startup Zendoc in late 2022 (Inc42, 2022). On 4 January 2023, it announced a further $25 million from Brookfield Growth, closing the Series D at $110 million (GeekWire, January 2023). Thirteen days later, on 17 January 2023, roughly 130 employees — about 15% of a workforce of more than 900 — were let go, with CEO Ajay Agrawal telling staff the company needed to “shift its business strategy towards profitability due to the current macroeconomic environment” (Inc42, January 2023). Departments hit included DevOps, analysts and support; affected staff were offered two months’ severance (Inc42, January 2023). It was not a company running out of cash — it was a company that had just raised more of it — which is what made the timing land so badly with employees (Inc42, January 2023).
The turning point
The January 2023 layoff is the pivot the rest of the story turns on. Before it: five funding rounds, $171 million raised in total (₹1,642 crore at $1≈₹96.0) (Tracxn, 2026), rapid headcount growth past 900 people, and an India RoC filing that, for the year to March 2023, showed losses nearly doubling year-on-year even as revenue rose (DealStreetAsia, 2023). After it: a public commitment, repeated by Agrawal for the next three years, to profitable growth over headcount growth. The financial filings that followed track the switch. For the year to March 2024, the India entity’s losses narrowed as the business leaned more on SaaS subscription revenue and pushed implementation work onto delivery partners rather than its own payroll (DealStreetAsia, 2024). By the year to March 2025, revenue had jumped roughly 50% year-on-year, even though losses widened again as the company kept investing (DealStreetAsia, 2026). And by early 2026, Agrawal was telling reporters the company had “already” turned profitable overall, ahead of the deal that handed control to Haveli Investments (LawNext, February 2026) — three years, almost to the week, after the layoff that started the shift.
The money behind it
Sirion raised $171 million across five priced rounds between 2014 and 2023 before its 2026 ownership change (Tracxn, 2026):
- Series A: $4.7 million (₹45 crore), led by Sequoia Capital, April 2014 (Tracxn, 2026; SirionLabs press release, 2014)
- Series B: $12.3 million (₹118 crore), led by Sequoia Capital (now Peak XV Partners), Qualgro and Canopy Ventures, July 2016 (Inc42, 2016)
- Series C: $44 million (₹422 crore), led by Tiger Global Management and Avatar Growth Capital, reported May 2020 (Entrackr, May 2020)
- Series D: $85 million (₹816 crore), led by Partners Group, with Tiger Global, Avatar Growth Capital and Peak XV Partners, April 2022 (TechCrunch, May 2022)
- Series D extension: $25 million (₹240 crore), from Brookfield Growth, January 2023, taking the round to $110 million total (GeekWire, January 2023)
Three backers did the most to shape the company. Peak XV Partners (as Sequoia Capital and Sequoia Capital India) was the first institutional investor, backing Sirion from the 2014 Series A through to 2026, and was publicly quoted supporting the Haveli deal as an existing shareholder (Artificial Lawyer, January 2026). Tiger Global Management, which co-led the 2020 Series C and joined the 2022 Series D, brought the late-stage capital that funded the acquisitions of Zendoc and Eigen Technologies. Partners Group led the largest single round, the $85 million 2022 Series D, at a point when Sirion was still describing its addressable market — outsourcing plus “goods-as-a-service” contracts — as worth $2.5 trillion a year (Inc42, 2016).
The capital structure changed completely in 2026. On 8 January 2026, Haveli Investments — an Austin, Texas-based software-focused private equity firm founded in 2021 by Vista Equity Partners co-founder Brian Sheth, with a debut fund of $4.5 billion — agreed to take a majority stake in Sirion, in a deal Reuters reported as valuing the whole company at around $1 billion with Haveli’s stake going up to 90% (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026). The transaction completed on 23 February 2026 and, per reporting on the closing, “cleared out” Sirion’s earlier venture investors, including Sequoia and Tiger Global, who exited as part of the buyout (LawNext, February 2026). Agrawal, who remains Founder and CEO, described it as neither “a buyout” in the traditional distress sense “nor a kind of a huge strategic fundraise”, but as a structure meant to give the company “a cohesive, unified voice at the board level” while it competes on frontier AI (LawNext, February 2026).
How it makes money
Sirion is a subscription software business, not a marketplace or a transaction-fee platform, so there is no published take rate. Enterprise customers sign annual or multi-year contracts for access to SirionOne, priced by a mix of user seats, product modules (contract authoring, obligation management, AI extraction, risk analytics) and the volume of contracts under management; published reference pricing for smaller deployments runs from roughly £120 to £175 per user per month, though the company sells its core enterprise business through a sales-led, quote-only process rather than self-serve tiers (SaaSworthy; xpay, 2026). Costs sit mostly in engineering and AI infrastructure, plus a sales force built for long enterprise cycles; the FY24 shift to “relying more on partners for implementation and delivery” (DealStreetAsia, 2024) was a direct margin lever — moving deployment labour off Sirion’s own cost base and onto third-party implementation partners.
- Core revenue: annual/multi-year SaaS subscriptions to the SirionOne CLM platform, tiered by seats, modules and contract volume (Sirion pricing pages, 2026)
- Add-on revenue: capabilities absorbed through acquisition — Zendoc’s contract repository (late 2022) and Eigen Technologies’ document-AI and data-extraction tools for insurance, finance and legal documents (June 2024) — sold into the existing base (Inc42, 2022; TechCrunch, June 2024)
- Delivery model: implementation and configuration increasingly routed through partners rather than Sirion’s own headcount, a change credited with narrowing losses in FY24 (DealStreetAsia, 2024)
The part buyers often get wrong, in Agrawal’s own framing, is treating Sirion as a legal-tech line item next to e-signature tools: “I don’t really see CLM as a legal tech category,” he told LawNext in February 2026, positioning the product instead as enterprise risk and compliance infrastructure that happens to live in the contract. The margin, on that logic, sits less in getting a document signed than in continuously reading what was signed — flagging missed obligations, auto-renewals and pricing drift months or years after the deal closed.
The numbers
Sirion is privately held and does not publish consolidated global financial statements. The clearest audited-adjacent trail is the Registrar of Companies filing for its India entity, Sirion Labs Private Limited, read alongside DealStreetAsia’s year-on-year earnings reporting on that filing. Precise rupee figures beyond the RoC’s disclosure band are not publicly available, so the table below states what is verifiable rather than an invented point estimate.
| Fiscal year (India entity, Sirion Labs Pvt Ltd) | Revenue | Profit/loss trend |
| FY23 (year to 31 March 2023) | Higher than FY22 (exact figure undisclosed) | Loss nearly doubled year-on-year (DealStreetAsia, 2023) |
| FY24 (year to 31 March 2024) | ₹100–500 crore, RoC filing band (Tofler) | Loss narrowed as SaaS revenue mix rose (DealStreetAsia, 2024) |
| FY25 (year to 31 March 2025) | Up roughly 50% year-on-year on FY24 (DealStreetAsia, 2026) | Loss widened again despite the revenue jump (DealStreetAsia, 2026) |
Set against that India-entity loss history, the company’s own account of its global business is starkly different: Agrawal and Sirion’s press materials describe roughly 40–50% annual revenue growth over the five years to 2026 and say the company had turned profitable ahead of the Haveli transaction (Artificial Lawyer, January 2026; LawNext, February 2026) — a claim that is company-stated and unaudited, not filed with any regulator, which is why it is reported here as attributed rather than treated as fact.
Where the money comes from
Sirion does not publish a geographic or segment revenue split. What is verifiable is the shape of its footprint and product line rather than a percentage breakdown of income:
- Geographic footprint: customers in more than 70 countries as of January 2026, served from 10 offices across the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, India, South Africa and Singapore (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026)
- Workforce concentration: an estimated 1,327 employees worldwide as of March 2026, with South Asia — chiefly the Gurugram base — accounting for roughly 80% of headcount (Revelio Labs, cited 2026)
- Named enterprise customers, disclosed via company case studies and funding coverage: Western Union (first customer), Vodafone, BP, Vestas Wind Systems, Qantas, Credit Suisse, Unilever, Morgan Stanley, Allianz Global Investors and Deutsche Post DHL (Inc42, 2016; TechCrunch, May 2022; GeekWire, January 2023)
- Product-line mix: core CLM subscriptions (SirionOne) plus two bolt-on capabilities bought rather than built — Zendoc’s contract repository (2022) and Eigen Technologies’ document-AI engine for regulated industries (2024) — both now sold as features of the same platform rather than separate products (Inc42, 2022; TechCrunch, June 2024)
The surprise, given how the company is usually filed under “legal tech” in press coverage, is how much of its expansion has come from financial-services and insurance-adjacent document processing (via Eigen) rather than from legal departments buying more CLM seats — a deliberate widening of the buyer beyond general counsel into procurement, risk and finance functions.
The risks
- Crowded, well-capitalised competition. Sirion competes directly with Icertis, DocuSign CLM, ContractPodAi (rebranded Leah), Ironclad, Agiloft, Juro and LinkSquares, all of which shipped their own AI agents for contract review, extraction and obligation tracking through 2025 (industry CLM comparisons, 2026). DocuSign, in particular, is extending a much larger existing customer base into CLM with its Iris AI engine, launched in 2025 — a distribution advantage Sirion does not have.
- A history of losses that has not fully closed, even as revenue grows. The India entity’s RoC filings show losses widening again in FY25 despite roughly 50% revenue growth that year (DealStreetAsia, 2026), following a pattern of losses nearly doubling in FY23 and only partially narrowing in FY24 (DealStreetAsia, 2023; 2024). Rapid growth has not, on this entity’s numbers, produced a clean run to sustained profit.
- Concentrated new ownership. Since February 2026, Haveli Investments holds a majority stake of up to 90% (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026), and the transaction cleared out long-tenured venture investors Sequoia and Tiger Global (LawNext, February 2026). Strategy, capital allocation and any future sale or IPO timeline now sit substantially with one private equity sponsor rather than a syndicate of venture investors and founders, a structural change in who bears — and controls — the company’s risk.
The takeaway
The lesson in Sirion’s arc is not “raise money, then cut costs” as a playbook — that sequence, done badly, is how startups lose the trust of the people who have to execute the turnaround. It is that the fastest fundraising years and the healthiest financial years are not the same years, and founders who can tell the difference, and act on it even when the balance sheet says they don’t have to yet, are the ones still setting the terms of their own sale a few years later. Sirion closed $110 million and cut 15% of its staff in the same month; three years after that, its founder was choosing his own acquirer rather than being chosen by one.
Frequently asked questions
What does Sirion do?
Sirion sells SirionOne, an AI-based contract lifecycle management platform that large enterprises use to draft, store, analyse and monitor commercial contracts after signature, tracking obligations, risk and compliance rather than just capturing a signature.
Who founded Sirion and when?
Ajay Agrawal, Claude Marais, Kanti Prabha and Aditya Gupta founded the company, incorporated in New Delhi on 11 September 2012 as SirionLabs; the product launched in December 2014 (RoC filing via Tofler; Inc42, 2016).
How much funding has Sirion raised, and who are its investors?
Sirion raised $171 million across five priced rounds between 2014 and 2023, from investors including Sequoia Capital/Peak XV Partners, Tiger Global Management, Avatar Growth Capital, Partners Group and Brookfield Growth (Tracxn, 2026), before Haveli Investments took a majority stake in a deal valuing the company at around $1 billion, completed in February 2026 (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026; LawNext, February 2026).
Is Sirion profitable?
The company says it turned profitable overall ahead of the 2026 Haveli transaction (Ajay Agrawal, quoted by LawNext, February 2026), though this is a company statement, not an audited disclosure; its India RoC-filed entity has continued to post losses through FY25, even as revenue grew (DealStreetAsia, 2023–2026).
Who owns Sirion now?
Haveli Investments, a US private equity firm, holds a majority stake of up to 90% since the deal closed on 23 February 2026, a transaction that also saw earlier investors Sequoia and Tiger Global exit; Founder and CEO Ajay Agrawal continues to lead the company (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026; LawNext, February 2026).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Tofler, “Sirion Labs Private Limited” company and financials pages, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn, “Sirion — Funding and Investors” and “Sirion Labs Private Limited” legal entity profile, accessed September 2026
- Wikipedia, “Sirion (software)”, accessed September 2026
- Inc42, “How Deeptech Startup SirionLabs Is Navigating The $2.5 Tn Enterprise Software Maze In India”, 2016
- Inc42, “Exclusive: Days After Raising $25 Mn Funding, Tiger Global Backed SirionLabs Lays Off Around 150 Employees”, January 2023
- Inc42, “Contract Management Startup SirionLabs Acquires Seattle-Based Zendoc To Enhance Offerings”, 2022
- GeekWire, “Contract lifecycle management startup SirionLabs raises $25M”, January 2023
- Entrackr, “Tiger Global and Avatar Growth Capital lead $44 Mn round in SirionLabs”, May 2020
- TechCrunch, “SirionLabs lands $85M to inject contract management with automation”, May 2022
- TechCrunch, “Sirion, now valued around $1B, acquires Eigen as consolidation comes to enterprise AI tooling”, June 2024
- BusinessWire / Morningstar, “Sirion Celebrates a Year of Significant Growth With a New Brand Identity”, April 2024
- DealStreetAsia, “Losses nearly double at Tiger Global-backed SirionLabs in FY23 despite higher revenues”, 2023
- DealStreetAsia, “Tiger Global-backed SirionLabs pares losses in FY24”, 2024/2025
- DealStreetAsia, “Tiger Global-backed SirionLabs posts deeper losses in FY2025 despite 50% revenue jump”, 2026
- Reuters, “Haveli to buy majority stake in contract software firm Sirion”, via Yahoo Finance, January 2026
- Artificial Lawyer, “Haveli Investments To Buy Majority Stake in Sirion”, January 2026
- LawNext, “Sirion Completes Majority Investment from Haveli, Aiming to Accelerate AI Push in CLM Market”, February 2026
- Sirion press room, “Haveli Makes Majority Investment in Sirion to Support Continued Growth”, 2026
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