Each of us have that one drawer in the house that contains all the documents, from birth certificate to everything that has happened since then. Just the idea of finding a single page from that stack of hundreds induces anxiety. Now imagine an office with tens of people and thousands of papers and the cost at which these are produced and maintained. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that this bill is not small.

But it does take a startup to figure out this pain point and build a product that addresses the same. Meet Wukla, a regtech company, that digitises legal contracts. Be it the credit card agreements or some insurance policy, these guys claim to turn make all of it digital.

How? Using a web portal, subscribed customers can enter details which customise contracts such as by inserting the parties’ names, date, amount involved and also changes in legal clauses, so that they instantly generate an agreement as per the tenets of law and reflecting negotiation. You can then download it, send it to the relevant person or print it out. There is also a dashboard that lets you store and sort all your documents in one place.

But what’s the point of a digitised contract when you eventually have to download and then print? Exactly! If you and I know that, then so does Wukla. Through sister startup, Paksign — founded and run by the same people — they let you sign documents electronically through digital signatures, as the name might suggest.

How does that differ from the good, old PDF? It’s in the identity of the signatory, as the document is locked and the audit trail can be seen by the admin for verification.

“We offer digital ledger for payment of stamp duty. This means that stamp duty will be tagged with specific documents, collected and deposited by Paksign for enterprise clients, essentially digitising the whole stamp duty process and eliminating the need for “Stamp Paper” in contracts,” Co-founder Altaf Qureshi says.

It is integrated with the Wukla platform (or can be accessed independently) thus offering an end-to-end digitisation of contracts, making the process both paperless and presenceless.

The startup was founded in 2015 by two lawyers - Altaf Qureshi and Sohaib Saleem - who felt digitising contracts was the simplest way tech could be used in law. Soon after, they joined The Nest I/O and got another co-founder, Mubariz Siddiqui, on board who parted ways not too long ago.

Back in the day, it was a direct consumer business that generated electronic contracts and sent them to your doorstep via courier. Basically, it catered to an average person’s legal needs: the usual contracts like rental agreements, transfer deeds etc. While the idea had potential and offered the much-needed convenience, getting a sustainable customer base was tricky as is usually the case with bootstrapped startups, especially in the B2C space.

Things soon changed for the better when they won the HBL innovation challenge, scoring not only grant money but also earning the same bank as a client. And with it, the startup pivoted towards the B2B segment, switching to generating digital contracts or enterprises.

“Organisations spend tonnes of money every year just on the courier of documents to get them signed by the relevant people, and then add to it the cost of producing them, engaging the lawyers and the time this entire process takes. Our solution offers to bring it down to minutes at a much lower price tag so naturally the B2B shift offered a great opportunity for us,” Qureshi says, explaining their shift.

Then just last November, Planet N — a holding company with stakes in a number of startups — bought a minority share in Wukla for an undisclosed amount. Using the newly acquired network, they are now trying to get more clients on board, particularly within the telecom and banking space.

As for the revenue stream, they have two: with enterprises, they have tailor-made price plans based on the client’s needs who are charged on per generation and signing while other consumers can buy the usual SaaS subscription and get a certain volume, again depending on the size.

Innovative it surely is, but breakthrough? Not so much. The concept has been tried and tested, most notably by Docusign, a San Francisco-based listed company that’s worth some $14 billion and made around $700 million in annual revenues last year.

Yes, there is hardly any competition in the local space, but Wukla is primarily targeting the big boys clubs anyway — telcos and banks — who can and often do buy foreign enterprise products, be it data portals or account management software. Does that mean the market would be difficult to tap on to considering that established players are already offering the same services?

“They are too expensive,” Qureshi instantly replies, adding right after “even if there is one giant, that doesn’t mean smaller players won’t emerge as the acquisition of Hellosign [for $230m] by Dropbox shows. Plus these big shots bring credibility and help open the market, which obviously is a positive.”

The writer is member of staff: m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com
Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, February 2nd, 2020