Collaborative contract service Glider launches after $1M seed round

Glider, a service that helps business teams collaborate on contracts, officially launched today after closing a $1 million seed round of financing. The company, a brainchild of Eli Rubel and Justin Thiele, announced this news today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.

The seed round, meant to spur on product development and help Glider grow its team, was led by True Ventures. Others taking part in the round were CrunchFund, TechStars and Portland Seed Fund, as well as several angel investors.

Liz Mansfield of True Ventures had kind words to say about Glider and its team.

“Glider is bringing the same transparency, visibility, and process that we have in the physical world to online workflow, a need we think is essential in today’s paperless office. True is thrilled to have led Glider’s seed round and congratulates them on a successful launch.”

Companies that do a lot of work with contracts might be interested in what Glider has to offer. The service feels like a Google Docs of sorts for the contract world, introducing shared documents and collaborative features with a little bit of task management thrown in. Not only can you share a contract to other members of your team for viewing, but those with permission can make edits. Version control and document comparisons ensure that you know what was changed from a previous version of a contract.

If you need a team member or customer to sign a contract, you can assign it to them. And, because Glider takes the world of contracts into the digital realm, the service supports e-signatures.

Not all companies work with contracts enough to justify the use of Glider, but those who are buried in them might want to give the service a serious look. Rubel believes that companies with busy Sales, Operations, Business Development and Legal departments will get the most value out of Glider.

The service’s “Contract Dashboard” is also a unique feature for those who want a full-scale view of their company’s contract activity. The dashboard shows the number of open contracts and can also display which phase they’re in — whether they’re still sitting inside the legal department or are out waiting for a customer’s signature.

Rubel believes the Contract Dashboard is an extremely useful feature.

“Until today, the only way for executives to get their hands on this data, was through the tedious process of emailing, calling, and asking for individual status updates throughout their organization.”

It seems Glider hopes to take some of the friction out of the process and make contracts, well, glide.

Starting this very minute, you can check out and sign up for Glider at glider.com.