Sirion: The Future of AI Contract Lifecycle Management

Ajay Agrawal is the Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of Sirion, a global enterprise SaaS cloud software firm backed by Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global.

A product visionary in the strategic legal technology space for more than 20 years, Ajay has led Sirion’s growth into a leading contract lifecycle management (CLM) provider trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises across the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Under his leadership, Sirion has driven a paradigm shift in the industry, moving away from traditional, low-tech administrative storage toward dynamic contract intelligence and lifecycle value enhancement.

He said: “At a time when the market is flooded with GenAI wrappers positioned as 'trusted AI', being named a Customers’ Choice by Gartner for the fourth consecutive year is something we’re incredibly proud of.

“It reinforces a simple truth: customers value technology that works – solutions that make their jobs faster, easier, and sharper. And they trust partners who listen, go deeper, and stay accountable to outcomes.

“This recognition reflects what our customers experience with Sirion every day. A 98% willingness-to-recommend score is a testament to that. The future of CLM belongs to those who build trust at scale – and we’re proud to be building that future together with our customers.”

Prior to founding Sirion in September 2012, Ajay was the Co-Founder and Chief Solutions Officer of UnitedLex Corporation. Founded in 2006, UnitedLex became a global leader in legal process outsourcing and strategic legal technology. Ajay led the company through a period of explosive, high growth, generating more than US$100m in enterprise value within four years.

Before his entrepreneurial career in legal tech, Ajay spent over a decade as a securities law expert. Between 1994 and 2006, he worked with some of the world’s leading firms and investment banks, structuring complex securities offerings, including structured Tier I capital, convertible and exchangeable securities, hybrid debt instruments, asset-backed securities and trust preferred securities. 

Ajay added: “Most enterprises already know this: better contracting drives better business. Eighty-eight percent say so. And yet, most still don’t act on it.

“Something big is happening. AI isn’t just speeding things up, it’s changing what’s possible. We’re moving from systems that record what happened to systems of engagement that understand what’s happening and act on what should happen next.

“Contracts are no longer paperwork. They’re intelligence.”

Sirion’s AI-native CLM infrastructure is trusted by leading multinational enterprises to manage complex contract portfolios, drive regulatory compliance and eliminate value leakage. 

Transforming telecoms and banking

As a leading global telecommunications service provider serving over half a billion people, Vodafone Group collaborates with more than 200,000 suppliers. Historically, the Vodafone Procurement Company (VPC), which manages roughly 70% of global spend, struggled with limited visibility over 30,000 supplier contracts stored across siloed IT systems. Heavy reliance on manual processes led to up to 10% contract value leakage, heavy approval loops and manual invoice matching.

In collaboration with AWS to ensure seamless resource scaling, Sirion digitised and migrated Vodafone’s more than 30,000 supplier contracts into a centralised repository and onboarded its entire supplier community. The platform also served as a plug-and-play solution for Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE) to digitise contracts for its top 50 enterprise sell-side customers.

A Global Head of SCM Development, Operations & Digital at Vodafone, said: “We procure to ensure that we deliver best possible services or products to our customers, and having that full oversight will only be possible if we start digitising and using the contracts to connect all the dots.”

Key impacts include:

• 80% reduction in supplier disputes: Achieved by leveraging Sirion’s AI capabilities to extract and track service levels (SLs) and obligations to validate invoices.
• 60% reduction in manual effort: Configurable workflow engines streamlined the creation process and drastically increased contract creation speed.
• 360-degree portfolio visibility: Converged buy-side (VPC) and sell-side (VGE) contract management into a unified shared ledger, offering instant access to approved clause libraries and content drafting automated in more than 70 languages.

Rajeev Kumar, Chief Customer Officer at Sirion, said: “Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. We believe, this recognition reflects the trust they place in Sirion to manage enterprise relationships across the full contract lifecycle.

“Enterprises today need a true system of record for their contracts, one that doesn’t just store agreements but actively drives decisions and outcomes. Powered by our proprietary knowledge graph, Sirion’s agentic CLM is helping leading global enterprises unlock the strategic value of every contract.”

Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) is a leading universal bank driving financial services across Central and Eastern Europe, serving corporate and retail customers across 12 countries with over 43,000 employees. Facing a "regulatory tsunami" of evolving European requirements, RBI was tasked with reporting 1.1 million data points to authorities, a near-impossible feat given its decentralised contract databases and fragmented regional visibility across 12,000 suppliers and 35,000 contracts.

Sirion established a central repository and outsourcing register to serve as RBI's single source of truth. The platform integrated with more than 20 enterprise systems across RBI’s application landscape and introduced local language interfaces to accelerate user adoption.

Key impacts include:

• Reduction in search and reporting times: Contract search and reporting times plummeted from an entire month to just a few days.
• Rapid incident response: During a third-party data breach, RBI was able to identify all affected third-party contracts within just five minutes.
• Audit-ready compliance: Provided direct, system-wide access to contracts, eliminating manual data transfers and giving procurement teams data-backed confidence to make fast, compliant decisions.

Edzard Janssen, Chief Procurement Officer of RBI, said: “Our head of security called about a third-party breach on a Friday evening. He needed an overview fast. I said, ‘Give me five minutes’, and it was five minutes.”

PayPal operates one of the world's largest digital payments networks, making commercial agreements central to its cross-jurisdictional operations. Managing its vast contract volume manually created business exposure, including contract risk inconsistencies, slow creation cycles and fragmented data across various enterprise platforms.

Sirion transformed PayPal's contract estate into an intelligent, automated system of record by implementing AI-driven automation for both fully automated executions and complex structured workflows.

Key impacts include:

• Intelligent portfolio management: Integrated the AskSirion conversational search and drafting tool across a repository of more than 300,000 documents under management.
• Connected enterprise ecosystem: Built deep integrations across six major enterprise applications, including Salesforce, Ariba, Workday, Certa and Diligent, ensuring contract data flows seamlessly across the systems touching PayPal's commercial relationships.
• Real-time risk mitigation: Deployed AI-driven issue detection and auto-redlining to surface negotiation gaps and contractual risks instantly across more than 80 automated contract templates.

Kanti Prabha, Co-founder & President at Sirion, added: “Contracts are more than just words. They are a web of logic and intent. While machines see words, lawyers see dependencies. Bridging that gap is one of the most exciting challenges we’re solving at Sirion.”