Every large company has the same dirty secret. They commit billions of dollars through contracts, then track those commitments in SharePoint folders, email chains, and 95-slide PowerPoint decks built from screenshots.
Brandon Card saw it firsthand. As an enterprise seller at Microsoft managing nine-figure deals, he watched Fortune 500 customers with $50 billion in supplier spend struggle to find their own contracts. Not analyze them. Find them.
“Companies treat contracts like legal documents,” Card says. “They are financial assets. Every obligation, every renewal, every commitment lives in those pages. And nobody can see any of it.”
That blind spot is what pushed Card to launch Terzo in March 2020, days before the world shut down. Six years later, the company is an AI-powered financial intelligence platform serving Fortune 1000 customers, and Business Insider recently named it one of the startups most likely to become tech’s next unicorn.
From Wall Street Dreams to Enterprise Software
Card’s path started with a detour. Coming out of Syracuse, he wanted Wall Street. Then 2008 happened. The economy cratered, and Card made a different bet. Technology.
He cut his teeth at Oracle, then IBM, then Microsoft. That decade in enterprise software gave him a front-row seat to a problem hiding in plain sight. Legacy contract lifecycle management tools were built by lawyers, for lawyers. They handled drafting and redlining. They did nothing for the finance and procurement teams who actually had to live with what was signed.
The math made the problem unsolvable by humans alone. Enterprise contracts run 300 to 400 pages. Large companies sign them by the thousands. No team on earth can read all of that, let alone track the financial obligations buried inside.
Why Accuracy Is the Whole Game
Plenty of startups have thrown large language models at documents. Card’s insistence on accuracy is what sets Terzo apart.
“An LLM can turn $1 million into $3 million if it misses context across related documents,” Card says. “In finance, that is not a bug. That is a catastrophe.”
Terzo’s answer is a hybrid model. AI does the heavy extraction at scale, and trained humans stay in the loop to verify financial data, pushing accuracy to 99.9 percent. It is a slower way to build than pure automation, but it is the only way CFOs will trust the numbers.
That trust is paying off. Terzo now helps Fortune 100 companies uncover billions in hidden waste sitting inside their contracts, invoices, and supplier spend. The company operates across the United States, Canada, and India, and recently introduced Nirvanai, a multi-agent AI advisor that turns contracts, spend, and operations into a single real-time source of truth.
The Bigger Bet
Card believes the entire category he came up in is changing. CLM, in his words, is a relic. What replaces it is something closer to “Service as Software,” where AI does the work instead of giving humans another dashboard to manage.
He is also refreshingly honest about the technology’s limits. On a recent episode of Founder’s Story with Daniel Robbins, Card argued that AI models are not fully under control yet, which is exactly why financial applications demand human oversight. It is a rare position for an AI founder. Most are selling certainty. Card is selling accuracy, and he knows the difference.
The opportunity in front of him is enormous. Card pegs the cost of enterprises doing nothing at $3 trillion. With a Series B on the horizon and unicorn chatter getting louder, Terzo is positioned to take a serious bite out of that number.
Not bad for a bet made the week the world stopped.
