A new Estonian startup, Pactum, has launched an artificial intelligence tool for commercial negotiations – namely, a system that helps companies autonomously offer personalised, commercial negotiations.
According to the company, referencing research by KPMG, inefficient contracting has been estimated to cause firms to lose between 17% to 40% of the value on a given deal, depending on circumstances.
“Pactum’s AI helps companies improve their bottom line by implementing bespoke negotiation services for large volumes of incremental partners in every market, that might have previously been unmanaged,” the company said in a statement.
“Augmented artificial intelligence evaluates agreement terms and offers an unbiased resolution that can result in either business development or renewed agreements where both parties have been equally evaluated to support a fair deal. Based on historical data, terms are suggested and discussed through an auto generated chat-like interface to generate a contract that is then ready for review and sign off.”
A team of AI experts from global tech companies
“According to our calculations, all the Fortune Global 500 companies together have 12 million supplier contracts that are unmanaged, also known as ‘tail spend’, amounting to around USD100 million to USD500 million per enterprise,” Martin Rand, the CEO of Pactum, said in a statement.
“Our system helps companies enable growth and bring in initially lost income through stronger agreements, while minimising waste by conducting thousands of parallel automated negotiations at a time. We’ve converted a process that used to take days, involving back and forth communication and preparation, contracts drafts, updates and approvals and signatures, etc to now take an average of 15 minutes.”
The team behind Pactum includes AI experts who have worked at successful startups and global tech companies, including Skype, Monsanto, e-residency and Starship.
USD1.15 million in pre-seed funding
The company, based in Mountain View, CA, with engineering and operations in Estonia, raised an initial USD1.15 million in pre-seed funding to augment AI capabilities and to scale operations.
Investors in the company are luminaries from the tech world including Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of Skype and Kazaa; Taavet Hinrikus, a co-founder of TransferWise; Ott Kaukver, the CTO of Twilio; and Sten Tamkivi, a former GM at Skype and the CPO at Topia.
The company’s name, Pactum, means “agreement” in Latin.
Cover: Pactum’s founders Kristjan Korjus, Martin Rand and Kaspar Korjus.
