Syntheia Acquires Motionize

Syntheia, a contract and data startup, has acquired Motionize, another startup which offers a Word add-in that improves access to knowledge and provides drafting guidance to transactional lawyers.

The move to acquire the business first started in April 2022, after the two companies had been collaborating for the six months prior. The acquisition process took about a month, and completed on 31 May 2022.

Following this acquisition, Syntheia will be offering four distinct products:

  • an intelligent drafting recommender that surfaces precedent clauses while inside Microsoft Word,
  • a multi-document terms comparer that identifies variances and risks between contracts,
  • a self-sorting clause bank for knowledge management of contracts, and
  • a suite of data extraction and natural language processing APIs for legal documents.

Horace Wu, Founder and CEO of Syntheia said:

“We are ecstatic about this deal. We have been working with Motionize for more than six months, and come to know them quite well. Both our companies pursue the common goal of putting relevant and useful information at lawyers’ fingertips. While Syntheia has been focused on building our machine learning engine, the team at Motionize has been laser focused on creating the best user experience and refining the frontend of their application. We are looking forward to incorporating features from Motionize to better serve our customers.”

Joshua Schoen, Co-founder and CEO of Motionize said:

“We believe this combination will ultimately bring forth a category defining drafting product. With Syntheia’s AI and Motionize’s easy-to-use interface, it has never been easier to spin off legal agreements. We are excited by our future together and the possibilities we will create.”

The co-founders of Motionize, Joshua Schoen and Luke Waltman, have become consultants to Syntheia following the acquisition.

About the parties

Syntheia helps lawyers navigate and work with complex contracts. Syntheia offers a number of applications for different legal workflows. These applications include a Word add-in that uses language models to make drafting suggestions from past work, a multi-document comparison tool that pinpoints variances and risks across contracts, and a KM portal that automatically transforms contracts into clauses and metadata.

Motionize is a US legal tech company that provides a Word add-in to help lawyers find and compare clauses from their past deals and precedents, while staying in their workflow in Microsoft Word, lawyers identify potential problems in their document, including unused or missing defined terms, and law firms share knowledge across their practice groups through centralizing clauses and precedents.