The Contract Network seeds $8M for collaborative contracting

Contract collaboration tool developer The Contract Network (TCN) raised $8 million in seed funding, CEO Jim Wagner tells Axios.

Why it matters: Companies like TCN are trying to make it easier for health care organizations to create contract development documents using modern, collaborative tools.

Details: Tusk Venture Partners led the round.

• Relativity founder Andrew Sieja participated, alongside The LegalTech Fund, Mayo Clinic, Toba Capital and GC&H Investments, an investment fund associated with Cooley LLP.
• Funds will go toward honing the product and marketing.
• Wagner declined to say when he foresees TCN raising a Series A.

How it works: The Atlanta-based company parses contracts into individual clauses and uses generative AI to add context to tracked changes and translate legalese into plain language.

• TCN's tools let parties collaborate on contracts in real time.
• "We take every change and turn it into simple, plain English so every person who's collaborating gets a simple executive summary for every turn of the agreement," Wagner says.

The backstory: Before starting TCN, Wagner built the AI-powered contract analysis company Apogee Legal, which merged in 2018 with Seal Software and in 2020 sold to DocuSign.

Be smart: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid recently set a goal to bring all 63 million-plus Medicare beneficiaries into value-based care models by 2030, meaning more payers and providers could be in the market for contract development tools since risk contracts can carry more complexity than fee-for-service contracts.

State of play: Syntax Health, which helps health care parties collaborate on value-based contract design, in June collected $8 million in seed funds.