When he was working as an investor at HIG Capital, Troy Pospisil wanted a solution for his biggest office headache.
On a daily basis, he and his coworkers had to review, negotiate, and manage a high volume of routine corporate contracts. Because his day was spent doing paperwork, the process would often slow down deals and take away from other important tasks.
“It took up a tremendous amount of time,” he told Fortune. “And it was done poorly, it was done inconsistently, and it was disorganized. So we started Ontra to solve that problem.”
Ontra uses artificial intelligence to process, negotiate, and manage routine contracts. Pospisil didn’t have a technical background, so he teamed up with his then-roommate who worked as a software engineer. Both of them had full-time jobs, so they worked on Ontra in the evenings.
“We would get home from work late at night, and we’d sit there for hours,” Pospisil says. “[My roommate] would program, and I would do the product work. That’s how we got to what I call ‘version zero’ of our software.”
Today, Ontra has grown far beyond “version zero.” The company has raised approximately $250 million in venture funding and grown to 350 employees. The fast growth has been a little bit of a double-edged sword, Pospisil says. More than 70% of the Ontra employee base has been hired in the past two years.
“I think scaling culture—when you’ve grown rapidly and you’re a remote-first company—is an unsolved problem,” he says. “We care a lot because we want this to be a great place to build a career, and we also want a high-performing team. So we’re constantly asking ourselves: ‘How, how can we make this just as much a magical place to work as it was in the early days, given this new environment?’”
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
