Hello from Recension
Vendor contract monitoring
- FounderRoman Sushko
Nine years as commercial counsel reading SaaS paper. Lost a renewal week diffing two downloaded PDFs in Word, against a file nobody could prove was the right one.
- CTOMarlowe Prescott
Built document pipelines for a filings archive, and learned there that the expensive part is never reading the file. It is proving to someone that you read it correctly.
- CPOIngrid Salazar
Ran vendor management at a mid-market company, keeping the renewal tracker by hand, because her own folder of dated downloads was the only version history anyone had.
Recension works for the person in legal who has to read a vendor's contract again.
What arrives is a master agreement as a PDF, a second PDF on what the subscription covers, and older versions on request. So the one question that matters, which clause moved since last time, has no answer until someone finds an old copy and diffs it in Word.
Recension is a subscription platform for legal teams.
They read in its web workspace, their systems call the API, and every file lands in their own bucket. Each night the platform fetches the legal pages every watched vendor publishes, and stops if nothing moved. Otherwise it keeps the file as found, cuts the text into clauses, dates and hashes the version, and diffs it against the last; every clause gets a link to paste into a ticket.
Telling where a clause ends, and matching it to the last version, is the hard half of Recension's job.
Numbering rules do most of that on a clean HTML page and much less on a two-column PDF or a renumbered schedule. The rest goes to a fine-tuned token classifier that reads layout, and an embedding model that proposes which earlier clause a new one matches, so a renumbered clause counts as moved, not deleted and added.
Recension is three people and a platform built around its review queue.
A match publishes only when its embedding score and similarity margin both clear a fixed threshold; below it, the pair waits in the queue, no diff ships, and the section stays unaligned until the match is confirmed or corrected. Each confirmation becomes a labeled pair from a public vendor document; we own those pairs and retrain the models on them.
Most of Recension's nightly fetches are cheap, because only what changed gets read again.
GPU load peaks at onboarding, when every version we hold for a licensee's vendors is backfilled, and when a vendor republishes its whole legal estate. Both models serve from cloud GPU instances we control in Dublin: hourly today, reserved from Q2 2027 with on-demand kept for spikes. Object storage there keeps every fetched file and clause tree, and never expires one.
Recension's models are retrained on Azure Machine Learning in Microsoft's North Europe region, in Ireland.
Training uses only reviewer-labeled pairs from public documents, and the backfill that re-embeds the whole corpus for a new embedding model runs there too. A watchlist names a licensee's live deals, so no hosted model API sees a document, a diff or a watchlist. Recension Data Ltd has been registered in Ireland since April 2020, and its office is in Galway.