About confided
We built confided because NDAs take days when they should take minutes.
The typical NDA takes 3 to 10 business days and 5 to 15 hours of labour, for a document most companies just need signed.
confided replaces that with a guided flow, a fixed standard, and a public record of execution.
Why we built confided
Most NDAs get signed, filed, and forgotten without ever being contested. Yet every one still goes through the same redline cycles, routing delays, and storage gaps as if it were a real negotiation.
e-signature tools solved the easiest part of that: getting a signature onto a page. The negotiation, the routing between parties, the storage afterward, and the tracking of obligations were left exactly as broken as before. NDAs are treated as a managed legal instrument when they're drafted, then abandoned as a business process the moment they're signed.
No single tool covers templating, multi-party coordination, identity verification, execution, and a public record of what was signed and when. confided closes that gap, so an NDA can be the tick-the-box exercise it was always meant to be.
The problem
NDAs aren't rare. Around 750,000 to 1,000,000 are executed globally every single day, covering hiring, fundraising, vendor onboarding, partnerships, and deals.
A typical bilateral NDA, not a heavily negotiated one, takes 3 to 10 business days and 5 to 15 hours of active labour across legal, business development, and admin staff. At a blended rate of $150 an hour, that's $750 to $2,250 per agreement. Heavily negotiated NDAs, in M&A or pharma for example, can run $5,000 to $20,000 or more. Shaving just 30 minutes off the average NDA would unlock roughly $20 billion in productivity a year, globally.
The pain isn't isolated to one step. It compounds across the lifecycle:
Before signing. Redline cycles on terms that rarely change deal to deal. Each party insists on its own template, and legal queues back up even for low-stakes agreements.
At signing. Counterparties use different e-signature platforms. Sequential multi-party signing creates bottlenecks, and "I never received it" is a genuine workflow killer.
After signing. NDAs get filed and forgotten. There's no central repository, expiry dates go untracked, and when a dispute arises, nobody can find the document.
Across the organisation. Business teams sign NDAs without legal visibility and with no standard template, repeating the same negotiation hundreds of times a year from scratch.
The solution
confided turns that lifecycle into a guided flow. Every NDA starts from the oneNDA standard, a fixed legal template with a small set of configurable variables, so there's nothing to redline. The initiator enters a counterparty's email, fills in their own details and parameters, and adds anyone else who needs to approve, sign, or witness. Once their email is verified, the counterparty receives a plain-language summary and the same guided flow on their side.
When all parties execute, the platform writes a permanent record of the agreement. Every execution generates a certificate: a document GUID, party GUIDs, a timestamp, and a cryptographic hash, published to a public ledger that proves the agreement exists without revealing who the parties are or what it says.
The goal is to make the NDA invisible: automated, standardised, tracked, and resolved, so the conversation it's meant to protect can start without friction.