Why We Invested in SpotDraft: Advancing Legal AI at the Edge

At Qualcomm Ventures, we invest in companies redefining what’s possible as AI becomes deeply embedded in enterprise workflows. Our investment in SpotDraft, an AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform, exemplifies this focus.  SpotDraft applies AI to one of the most complex and text-intensive domains—legal contracting—while pushing the boundaries of performance, privacy, and deployment through on-device intelligence.

Legal teams operate in an environment where precision, confidentiality, and trust are essential. Yet many legacy CLM tools fall short of delivering the performance or privacy that the demands of real-world legal work require. SpotDraft is changing this by bringing contract intelligence directly to the edge.

What Makes SpotDraft Different?

Founder-Market Fit That Sets SpotDraft Apart

Strong vertical AI companies are built by teams who deeply understand both the domain and the technology. SpotDraft’s founders uniquely embody this intersection.

Shashank Bijapur, co-founder and CEO, graduated from Harvard Law School and brings firsthand experience as a lawyer in marquee law firms, is deeply familiar with the friction inherent in legal workflows —and why many tools fail to gain real-world adoption.

Madhav Bhagat, co-founder and CTO, a computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University who sharpened his technical chops at Google, brings deep systems engineering and AI expertise, designing architectures optimized for performance, scalability and enterprise reliability.

Together, they are building with intention: translating real legal workflows into AI systems designed for accountability, explainability, and adoption.

Why Legal Work Is Uniquely AI-Ready

Legal workflows are inherently structured. Contracts follow patterns, clauses map to logic, and risks can be reasoned about systematically.   In many ways, contracts are “programs written in natural language,” making them a compelling fit for AI-driven automation.

SpotDraft has demonstrated how large language models can:

• Analyze and summarize contracts
• Identify risk areas and inconsistencies
• Recommend edits aligned with organizational standards
• Accelerate review without comprising control or judgement  

The result is faster and more consistent legal outcomes, with better auditability and quality.

Why On-Device AI Matters for Legal Teams

What truly differentiated SpotDraft is their deployment philosophy.

Traditional enterprise AI relies heavily on cloud inference, but for legal teams working with highly sensitive data, this is often not viable.  

SpotDraft takes a different approach, by optimizing their proprietary models, trained on vast amounts of negotiation clauses and deltas, to run locally on-device powered by Snapdragon platforms.

This delivers meaningful advantages:

• Enhanced privacy — data never leaves the user’s machine
• Lower latency — instant contract analysis and drafting
• Greater control — ideal for regulated or high-security environments
• Cloud independence — enabling hybrid and offline workflows

This aligns closely with Qualcomm’s belief that the future of enterprise AI will be hybrid and increasingly edge-first.  SpotDraft represents a powerful example of how on-device AI can unlock new categories of secure, trust-critical enterprise applications.

Looking Ahead

SpotDraft is not just modernizing contract management, they are building the foundation for how legal teams will operate in an AI-native world.  Their on-device and hybrid AI architectures mirror Qualcomm’s vision of enabling AI everywhere: faster, safer, and closer to the user.

We look forward to supporting SpotDraft as they expand globally and continue advancing what is possible with on-device and hybrid AI architectures.