Agree, an all-in-one agreements platform that seamlessly integrates money movement, has announced a $3M pre-seed round. The round was led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from 8-Bit Capital, Everywhere Ventures, Expedite Ventures, Firsthand Alliance, Hustle Fund, NEA, Singh Capital Partners, and Trust Fund. With this investment, the company aims to become an end-to-end agreements platform that allows consumers to securely send, sign, and automatically generate invoices and payments from any agreement.
“The process that exists today when dealing with e-signatures and payments is completely disjointed and prone to financial losses”
Today, the experience of going from an agreement to a signature to payment fulfillment is highly fragmented. Typically, an agreement goes through multiple revisions before it’s uploaded to an e-signature platform. If payment is required as part of the agreement, the process is done separately using additional invoicing tools. Agree’s platform, which leverages generative AI and optical character recognition, removes this friction by integrating the e-signature process, contract development, invoicing, and payment all in one platform. With Agree, consumers can receive payment through ACH, credit cards, or wire transfers and sync their financial transactions with all major accounting software.
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The inspiration for the platform came from Marty Ringlein and Will Hubbard, two former founders with prior exits and early-stage investors, who experienced firsthand the many pain points of forming a contract and moving money when working with founders. In an effort to find a solution, both Ringlein and Hubbard looked for platforms to use but instead discovered organizations were left to duct-tape their own agreement and payment workflow. That’s when Ringlein and Hubbard decided to build an all-in-one agreements platform. They first started with market research to validate whether their own frustrations with agreements and money movement were a common pain point. After speaking to contractors, small business owners, startups, and large enterprise companies, they quickly learned their frustrations were not uncommon.
“The process that exists today when dealing with e-signatures and payments is completely disjointed and prone to financial losses,” said Marty Ringlein, CEO and co-founder of Agree. “We believe everyone should be able to form a contract where all parties can collaborate and see in real-time what changes have been made while also transacting on those agreements. With Agree, consumers can now complete all these tasks using one platform.”
Behind the company is a team of fintech veterans who have developed accounting, banking, compliance, cybersecurity, and fraud solutions for companies such as Brex, Eventbrite, and Plaid. According to Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, the team’s product background gives them a unique advantage in transforming an industry that’s seen minimal innovation in the past two decades.
“Upon meeting the team, we were impressed by their ability to build and scale meaningful products and their drive to solve a universal problem millions of consumers face when creating a contract and receiving payment. What we have today is an antiquated system that requires consumers to piece together multiple products, which, quite frankly, is inefficient and a missed opportunity among some of the companies that have been doing this for decades. We couldn’t be more excited to join Marty and Will in their journey to building a product that will change how agreements and payments are done.”
To help consumers throughout a contract lifecycle and beyond, Agree has developed an infrastructure powered by AI that automatically extracts critical information from a contract, such as names, titles, addresses, and payment terms, and can generate and issue an invoice. The platform also allows users to collaborate with multiple parties in real-time when editing a contract. “Our goal is to make it easy for all consumers to draft an agreement, send it, sign it, create an invoice, and securely collect payment,” said Will Hubbard, co-founder of Agree. “We envision a world where contracts and payments are no longer a tedious burden and instead become a seamless experience.”
The company launched its beta platform early this year and has been working with several early-stage founders and venture capital firms to facilitate simple agreements for future equity (SAFE) contracts. Agree says it plans to provide its e-signature feature to all consumers at no cost and will introduce an enterprise offering with accounts receivable automation, enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM integrations, and an API for customizable workflows by the end of the year.
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