Shashank Bijapur

CEO and Co-Founder SpotDraft

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Shashank Bijapur is the CEO and co-founder of SpotDraft, a contract lifecycle management platform that uses AI to help in-house legal teams draft, negotiate and manage contracts. He is a corporate lawyer by training. After studying law at Harvard he worked at White & Case in New York, and he started SpotDraft in 2017 after seeing how much of a lawyer’s time routine contract work took up. The company has offices in New York and Bengaluru. It raised a $54 million Series B in February 2025, when it reported more than 250 employees and over 400 customer organisations, and an $8 million extension from Qualcomm Ventures in January 2026.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded SpotDraft in 2017 with Madhav Bhagat, now its CTO, and leads it as CEO.
• Raised a $54 million Series B in February 2025, co-led by Vertex Growth Singapore and Trident Growth Partners, after a $26 million Series A in March 2023.
• Added an $8 million Series B extension from Qualcomm Ventures in January 2026, tied to privacy-first, on-device AI for legal work.
• Practised corporate law as an attorney at White & Case in New York, and earlier at Talwar Thakore and Associates in Mumbai.

Professional Journey

Bijapur studied law at Harvard Law School. He practised corporate law at Talwar Thakore and Associates in Mumbai and joined White & Case in New York as an attorney.

He got the idea for SpotDraft while working as an associate at White & Case. In a 2025 interview he described watching capable lawyers spend hours on administrative work rather than legal judgement. He asked himself: “How are people building tech for self-driving cars, yet here I am, copy-pasting words on a contract?”

He founded SpotDraft in 2017 with Madhav Bhagat, a Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who had worked at Microsoft and Google and is now the company’s CTO. SpotDraft sells contract lifecycle management software to in-house legal teams, covering drafting, review, approvals and storage, with AI increasingly built into each step. The company has offices in New York and Bengaluru. Its investors include Premji Invest, Arkam Ventures and Prosus.

SpotDraft raised a $26 million Series A in March 2023. In February 2025 it closed a $54 million Series B co-led by Vertex Growth Singapore and Trident Growth Partners, with Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures and Prosus Ventures participating. It then had more than 250 employees across Bengaluru and New York and over 400 organisations on its platform. Bijapur called 2025 “an inflection point for team SpotDraft” and said the company would go further in using AI in the product. In January 2026 Qualcomm Ventures invested $8 million as an extension to that round. The company presented this as support for AI that keeps sensitive legal documents on the device rather than sending them to outside cloud models.

Education

Harvard Law School

Law. The company does not state the degree.