Struggling in a sea of contract documentation, from main and subcontracts to variations, specifications and schedules? Lexilio converts these into a live commercial system and spots obligations/deadlines, key risks and any contradictions across the varied project materials.
Muhammad Yawar Malik, chief executive of Lexilio, talks us through his venture.
CM Digital: What problem does your technology solve and how does it do it?
Muhammad Yawar Malik: Contractors rarely lose money because they signed a bad contract. They lose it in what happens after signing. A project runs on a suite of interconnected documents: main contract, subcontracts, variations, specifications, insurance schedules. Buried across them are hundreds of obligations, and some carry brutal consequences. Under FIDIC, a claim not notified within 28 days is time-barred. A contractor can be entirely in the right, hold every record proving the delay and still lose seven figures because nobody sent an email in time.
The second problem is that those documents contradict one another. A main contract allows 28 days to notify; the subcontract beneath it allows 14. Those gaps stay invisible until a claim lands on them and by that point the margin has gone.
Lexilio reads the entire contract suite across FIDIC, NEC, JCT and AIA, and converts it into a live commercial system. Every obligation is extracted with its clause reference and deadline. Every risk and commercial opportunity is surfaced. Every cross-document conflict is flagged. When a notice is required, the platform drafts it against the exact requirements of that project’s clauses, and a commercial manager reviews and approves it before anything is issued.
We built it for the people who carry the commercial risk day to day: quantity surveyors, commercial managers and contract administrators. Almost every contract AI product before this was designed for legal departments and the commercial teams doing the work were never given a tool of their own.
OK, who’s tested or is already using your tech and what are the results?
Muhammad Yawar Malik: Lexilio is in daily use by commercial teams across the UK, United States, Canada, UAE and Saudi Arabia, on work ranging from regional projects to major infrastructure programmes.
Contract suite reviews that previously took a commercial team several days at project start are completed in minutes. Obligation registers that lived in a spreadsheet, or in one person’s head, become a tracked system with deadlines and alerts attached to named owners.
Cross-document conflict detection is the capability that surprises users most. Teams upload a suite they believe they know thoroughly, and Lexilio identifies notice-period mismatches between the main contract and the subcontracts beneath it on day one. We have yet to see a clean suite.
CM Digital: Tell us about your senior management team’s background.
Muhammad Yawar Malik: Lexilio is an engineering-led business. Our founding background is not legal but site reliability engineering, security governance and large-scale infrastructure: the discipline of keeping critical systems running and being accountable when they fail. Our founder is an IEEE Senior Member, has peer-reviewed more than 25 research papers for IEEE Access and has published extensively on production engineering and secure AI operations.
That background is the origin of the product. Construction contracts fail in precisely the way infrastructure fails: silently, between systems, with no monitoring attached. An obligation is a service commitment nobody tracks. Conflicting clauses across documents are two systems running different configurations. We looked at an industry moving trillions of dollars through documents with no observability layer over any of it and recognised the failure pattern immediately.
CM Digital: Are you looking for funding?
Muhammad Yawar Malik: We have not taken outside investment to date. Growth has been funded by customer revenue, which has kept the roadmap anchored to what commercial teams need rather than to what performs well in a pitch deck.
Enterprise demand across the Middle East and North America is now accelerating faster than that approach comfortably supports, so a raise is likely in the future. Our selection as one of ten companies for Baltic Ventures Launchpad 2026 (a programme to accelerate start-ups in Liverpool) forms part of preparing for that properly. Our immediate priority is taking Lexilio Autopilot, our multi-agent commercial system, into private beta this quarter.
