Geneva legaltech start-up ZAAN raises USD 5 million from Tencent

ZAAN, the Geneva- and Shenzhen-based contract-intelligence platform, has raised USD 5 million from Tencent Investment to develop its AI engines, broaden language and jurisdiction coverage, and grow its teams.

ZAAN, a contract-intelligence platform based in Geneva and Shenzhen, has raised USD 5 million from Tencent Investment. The funding will support the continued development of ZAAN’s AI engines, broader language and jurisdiction coverage, and the growth of its engineering and legal-data teams across its European offices.

Built with lawyers and DeepMind alumni, ZAAN is designed to read contracts the way a senior associate would, flagging only what deserves a partner’s attention and linking every flag back to its source through cited reasoning. The platform runs on three engines: Review, which checks drafts against a firm’s own playbooks and suggests inline redlines; Draft, which composes house-style boilerplate; and Recall, which answers questions across a team’s entire matter history in seconds. ZAAN supports 38 languages and integrates with tools that firms already use, including Word, iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint, with zero-retention, per-tenant encryption by design.

To date, more than 340 firms and legal teams have used ZAAN to review over 2.4 million contracts. Across active M&A accounts, the platform has reduced median first-pass review time by 62 percent and surfaces more than three times as many clauses for partner review as manual triage. ZAAN also runs an Open Bar program that provides the platform at no cost to legal aid clinics and pro bono practitioners worldwide.