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AXDRAFT

Winter 2019Acquired

AXDRAFT helps corporations draft, negotiate and approve documents 10x…

Save
AXDRAFT logo

AXDRAFT

Winter 2019Acquired

AXDRAFT helps corporations draft, negotiate and approve documents 10x…

Save
Company details

AXDRAFT analyzes patterns in your legal documents and transforms drafting process from erroneous and time consuming copy and paste to a mistake-free simple Q&A. The average time to draft a document with AXDRAFT is less than 4 minutes.

On top of this AXDRAFT allows to integrate data into the document from public registers and your internal databases, eliminating the need to double check every data input.

Data validation, e-signatures, access control, document id, visibility and personal accountability for drafted documents. All of this is possible with AXDRAFT.

45 corporations using AXDRAFT reduce time spent on drafting legal documents by up to 90% and shorten their approval cycles by up to 4 days.

Both of these improvements mean more deals and better financial results for your company every quarter.

And the best part is that from the moment we sign the contract AXDRAFT can be up and running in 2 weeks.

Few case studies are available here: https://www.axdraft.com/customers

Location
Kyiv, Ukraine; Frankfurt, HE, Germany; Lviv, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine
Founded
2017
Category
Machine Learning
YC Directory Pageaxdraft.com
Founders
  • OZ
    Oleg Zaremba
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn
  • YZ
    Yuriy Zaremba
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn

AXDRAFT analyzes patterns in your legal documents and transforms drafting process from erroneous and time consuming copy and paste to a mistake-free simple Q&A. The average time to draft a document with AXDRAFT is less than 4 minutes.

On top of this AXDRAFT allows to integrate data into the document from public registers and your internal databases, eliminating the need to double check every data input.

Data validation, e-signatures, access control, document id, visibility and personal accountability for drafted documents. All of this is possible with AXDRAFT.

45 corporations using AXDRAFT reduce time spent on drafting legal documents by up to 90% and shorten their approval cycles by up to 4 days.

Both of these improvements mean more deals and better financial results for your company every quarter.

And the best part is that from the moment we sign the contract AXDRAFT can be up and running in 2 weeks.

Few case studies are available here: https://www.axdraft.com/customers

Location
Kyiv, Ukraine; Frankfurt, HE, Germany; Lviv, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine
Founded
2017
Category
Machine Learning
YC Directory Pageaxdraft.com
Founders
  • OZ
    Oleg Zaremba
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn
  • YZ
    Yuriy Zaremba
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn

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On this page
  • Overview
  • Founding Story
  • Timeline
  • What They Built
  • Market Position
  • Target Customers
  • Market Size
  • Competition
  • Business Model
  • Traction
  • Post-Mortem
  • Event: Onit was assembling a complete contract stack
  • Asset: deterministic drafting filled the missing step
  • Decision: the founders chose the platform's distribution
  • Outcome: the product became a durable component
  • Key Lessons
  • Sources

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Exec Briefing

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about AXDRAFT (W19).

  1. Domain expertise found the compiler unit. Repeated clauses and decisions turned complex legal work into structured questions that software could assemble safely.
  2. A working outcome sharpened discovery. The ten-field lease gave lawyers enough value to judge the product and produced the first customer commitments.
  3. Distribution experiments can stay separate. Free startup documents created U.S. attention while enterprise subscriptions remained the funded revenue engine.
  4. Packaging changed the economics. Larger minimum commitments raised MRR for the same software and made the purchase legible to corporate legal departments.
  5. Complementarity created a durable exit. The buyer needed multilingual drafting beside review and workflow, retained both founders, and kept the product active.

Overview

AXDRAFT turned a lawyer's clause library into a question-and-answer compiler for contracts. Yuriy and Oleg Zaremba founded the company in Ukraine in 2017, combined legal and engineering expertise, entered Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, and sold to corporate legal departments. The product generated multilingual agreements, routed review and approval, validated data, and maintained a live preview.

Onit acquired AXDRAFT in December 2020. This was a completed strategic acquisition: Onit retained the brand as an independent subsidiary, kept both founders in operating roles, and still markets the product in 2026.[1][11] The purchase joined AXDRAFT's drafting engine to Onit's contract review, workflow, and repository products. AIN described the price as an undisclosed multimillion-dollar amount based on a founder statement, but no filing or contract verifies the number.[3]

Current AXDRAFT and ContractWorks document management interface
AXDRAFT now feeds completed agreements and metadata into Onit's ContractWorks repository.

Image 1 / 1

Founding Story

Yuriy Zaremba spent more than six years practicing corporate law, including M&A work at Avellum. The recurring work bothered him: start with an old agreement, find alternate clauses in prior files, paste them together, and proofread the result. In a 2017 legal-industry interview, he described AXDRAFT as an attempt to automate that mechanical assembly process.[7]

His brother Oleg supplied the engineering half. Oleg had worked as a senior software engineer at Booking.com and studied applied mathematics, materials science, and quantum physics. Yuriy recalled the question that started their collaboration: “Can't you just build a library and then answer questions and get proper clauses!?”[6] Oleg built a prototype that collected ten fields and produced a ten-page lease agreement.

The brothers kept working in their spare time, then showed the prototype to lawyers in Yuriy's network. Four of the first five prospective customers said they would use it, according to Yuriy. The initial customers included Avellum, MHP, and ePravo.[8] The product started with professional users in Ukraine and expanded to enterprises such as DTEK.

The founders saw the team composition as the edge. On Hacker News, Yuriy wrote: “We are a team of brothers, who combine legal and tech expertise.”[5] That pairing let AXDRAFT encode clause choices and legal explanations in software while preserving the document format, approvals, and integrations corporate departments expected.

Timeline

  • 2017: Yuriy and Oleg Zaremba began AXDRAFT in Ukraine and sold an early question-driven drafting product to local legal teams.[6]
  • 2018: Overkill Ventures backed the company. The investor later named Carlsberg and British American Tobacco as customers.[10]
  • Winter 2019: AXDRAFT joined Y Combinator and received $150,000. A subsequent $1.1 million round included FundersClub.[4][9]
  • March 2019: The founders launched free startup documents on Hacker News. The post received 172 points and 64 comments.[5]
  • July 2019: Yuriy reported more than 40 customers, $15,000 MRR, 20% monthly revenue growth, and eight employees. These figures were not audited.[6]
  • December 17, 2020: Onit acquired AXDRAFT, retained the brand, and appointed Yuriy general manager and Oleg CTO.[1]
  • 2026: Onit continues to market AXDRAFT, now connected with ContractWorks for storage, reporting, reminders, and contract metadata.[11]

What They Built

AXDRAFT encoded a document as questions, clause alternatives, variables, conditions, validations, and approvals. A business user answered a guided questionnaire while a live preview showed the resulting agreement. The system could pull data from public registers or internal databases, generate documents in languages including Chinese and Japanese, and send work through negotiation and signature.[1]

The proprietary automation language mattered because it made templates extensible. Corporate lawyers could preserve approved wording while business teams completed routine agreements. Onit said AXDRAFT could turn a document of any complexity into a Q&A process and complete common NDAs or service agreements in less than five minutes. Those speed claims came from the companies and lack an independent benchmark.

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