Digital contracting company Ironclad today launched a new product designed to help companies collaborate on contracts with external parties.

At a time when traditional business processes have had to move online due to the remote working surge, companies such as Ironclad have been well-positioned to capitalize. The San Francisco-based company pitches itself as a “contract lifecycle management” (CLM) platform, one that supports many of the key parts of the contract workflow — this includes collaborative editing, so that different teams in an organization can work toward making a business agreement compliant and water-tight.

Contract collaboration

With Ironclad, users can @mention colleagues to garner feedback or accept/reject any edits that have been made. And the myriad integrations unlocks data and functionality from third-party services spanning e-signatures, CRMs, and cloud storage.

However, traditional contract negotiations with third-parties has always entailed countless back-and-forth exchanges, often involving numerous Word or Excel docs and unwieldy email interactions that are tricky to keep on top of. And this is where Ironclad Connect enters the fray.

Ironclad Connect extends the platform’s core functionality outside the host organization, so that @mentions, comments, version control, task-assignment, and more, are no long reserved for the Ironclad customer itself. It’s a little like a “secure, enterprise-grade Google Docs,” according to the company — one built specifically for business contracts.

So in effect, all the counterparties to a new sales agreement now have their own private sandbox account powered by Ironclad’s technology, where they can engage with the documents and communicate in a single interface.

Founded in 2014, Ironclad has amassed an impressive roster of customers in its eight-year history, including Mastercard, Dropbox, L’Oréal, and Reddit. The latest launch follows a flurry of activity for the company — it recently hit a $3.2 billion valuation off the back of a $150 million funding round. This followed a new AI partnership with Google to transform contracts into “operational data pipelines” — it’s all about processing and understanding the content of documents at scale.

Ironclad Connect builds on that momentum, by alleviating much of the spadework involved in getting a contract over the line — centralization is the name of the game.

“Contract negotiation has always been a convoluted process, primarily because traditional tools like Word and email fragment communication – rather than centralize it,” Ironclad senior VP of product Steven Yan said in a statement. “By baking collaboration directly into the contracting experience, Ironclad Connect helps teams and counterparties work with each other to reach common ground faster and more efficiently.”