Draftwise

Draftwise develops an AI platform for contract drafting, review and negotiation that operates on a customer's own document corpus. The product connects to a firm's document management system and complete deal history — documents, clauses and tags — and uses that material to generate client-ready drafts, produce redlines, interpret incoming redlines and comments, read version history and answer research questions across millions of documents. It automatically builds playbooks and curates document collections from existing precedent and guidance, rather than requiring lawyers to tag documents or maintain static clause libraries manually.

On the negotiation side, the platform presents comparable terms from past deals in tables organized by client, counterparty or industry, and benchmarks proposed revisions against EDGAR filings to test whether a position is market-standard. It also flags risks and extracts key contract insights. A separate in-house offering targets corporate legal departments with automated first-pass review, redlining against internal legal guidelines, and proofreading functions that detect incorrectly defined terms, inconsistent cross-references and formatting errors. In 2026 the company introduced a "Legal Ontology" layer that structures and makes queryable a firm's negotiating positions, fallbacks and counterparty patterns across its deal history.

Founding story

Former Palantir engineering leaders James Ding and Emre Ozen teamed with Ozan Yalti, a Stanford Law School graduate who had practiced for about ten years at global firms including Clifford Chance, to launch the company in 2020 on the premise that contracts are data-rich assets that firms underuse. Ding spent roughly ten years working on AI, leading teams at Palantir building big-data AI solutions and patenting work in data security and machine learning that underpins Draftwise; Ozen was Enterprise Technical Lead at Palantir focused on cybersecurity and data management, holds a Master's from Columbia and a Bachelor's from Georgetown, and began his career in finance at Deutsche Bank and Barclays.

Business model

Business-to-business software sold to law firms and corporate in-house legal departments, deployed alongside the customer's document management system and the tools lawyers already work in.

Traction

Y Combinator lists a team size of 50 and multiple open roles across the US and UK. Press coverage of the Series A described the platform as in daily use at top law firms across North America, Europe and Australia, with customers using it to access decades of deal history, market trends and counterparty-favored terms. The company cites review speed improvements of up to 30% and reduction of language-search time from about 30 minutes to under 60 seconds for in-house teams.

Latest developments

In June 2026 Draftwise announced a partnership with Egnyte to deliver contract intelligence inside secure document workflows. In August 2026 it announced its Legal Ontology platform, a structured, queryable layer covering negotiating positions, fallbacks and counterparty patterns across a firm's deals, and published takeaways from ILTACON 2026.