Covenant.
The contract desk for South African business. Write it, send it for signature, and keep it — one place for the agreement, the evidence and the record. An alternative to DocuSign, PandaDoc and Adobe Sign, built for South African law rather than translated into it.
The document,
and the proof behind it.
A contract is a white page with black text that becomes a PDF, so that is exactly what Covenant shows you — a real page in a quiet workspace, with the signature fields placed where they belong.
Beside it sits the part that matters later: who has signed, who has not, and the append-only chain of everything that has happened to this document since it left your outbox. Every entry carries the previous entry's fingerprint, so the record can be shown to be whole.
Where the law
draws the line.
Most contract software is built somewhere else and sold here unchanged. That is fine until it matters. South African law does not permit an electronic signature on every agreement — and a platform that signs one anyway produces a document that is void, with nobody finding out until it is tested. Covenant classifies every document before it can be sent.
Ordinary commercial agreements
The everyday work of a business — signed in Covenant, with the evidence to stand behind it.
Suretyships
Our courts have held electronically signed suretyships invalid, leaving the creditor without the security they thought they had. Covenant produces the document, tracks it, and takes the scanned original back.
Excluded documents
South African law excludes these from electronic signature entirely. Covenant refuses to send them, names the statute, and explains what to do instead.
This looks like a suretyship.
South African law requires these to be signed by hand, so Covenant won't send it for e-signature. We'll generate the deed for signature and track it for you — here's what to do instead.
The check cannot be waived, overridden or turned off.Write it, send it,
keep it.
Covenant is not an e-signature button bolted to a file store. The document, the people signing it, the evidence and the record are one thing, handled in one place — and the parts you rely on years later are built first.
Written once, reused
Build a document from a reusable template or from scratch, place the fields each party has to complete, and set the order they sign in. What you drafted last quarter becomes what you send this morning.
From your own mailbox
Contracts leave from your domain, never a shared platform sender. Your client receives an agreement from you — not from a company they have never heard of, in a template they have learned to distrust.
Nothing to join
Signers receive a link, read the document and sign. No account, no install, no password. The people you do business with should not have to become users of your software to agree with you.
Fixed at the moment it goes
The moment a document is sent, the rendered file and every field position become immutable. A signature on a document that can still be edited is a signature worth arguing about — so Covenant makes the argument impossible.
A chain, not a list
Every event — sent, opened, signed, declined, expired — is written to an append-only trail where each entry carries the previous entry's fingerprint. Every completed document gets a certificate of completion alongside it.
Findable in five years
Signed agreements stay in one searchable archive with their status, their parties and their dates — and their retention. When a document's time is up, it goes, and the proof that it went stays behind.
Built to be relied on
years after the signing.
A contract platform is judged on the day something goes wrong, not the day it is bought. Covenant is built for that day — and for POPIA, whose duties are implemented here as features rather than promised in a policy.
The classification gate
Every document is classified before it can be sent. What the law excludes is blocked with the statute named; what needs a handwritten signature is routed to the wet-ink track. There is no override.
Hash-chained audit trail
Append-only, with each entry carrying the fingerprint of the one before it. The record is not merely stored — it can be shown to be whole.
APPEND-ONLYCertificate of completion
Every signed document carries its own certificate — the parties, the sequence, the timestamps and the fingerprints — issued with the document, not reconstructed later.
Destruction you can prove
Each document is encrypted under its own key. Destroying that key makes the bytes unrecoverable everywhere they exist, including in backups — while the record that the destruction happened survives to prove it.
HR walled off
Employment documents are separated from the staff who handle client contracts. The people who need to see an agreement are not automatically the people who may see a disciplinary record.
Two-factor sign-in
Built in-house rather than delegated, so the door to your contract archive is not someone else's dependency. Hosted in South Africa, with data residency in South Africa by design.
Live, for one organisation —
on the same path as Synapse.
Covenant is the third product off the line. It is deployed, it is serving a real organisation, and its staff are putting it through its paces. From here it follows the path the others took: proven in-house first, then opened up, deliberately and slowly.
The whole contract desk
Templates and document building, sending from your own domain, signing without an account, the classification gate, the wet-ink track, the freeze on send, the hash-chained audit trail and the searchable archive — all deployed and in use.
Alpha — liveHardening for other businesses
Proving it against real agreements at its first organisation, then preparing Covenant for the businesses that come after — the step that turns a working platform into a product someone else can run.
ProductisingOpening up
Wider access by invitation, more document types recognised by the classification gate, and deeper reporting across an organisation's agreements. Coming, not yet live.
Coming soonWant Covenant when it opens up?
Tell us what you sign — how many agreements go out in a month, what you use today, and whether any of it is the kind of document South African law treats differently. We are bringing organisations in a few at a time, so we can support each one properly.
Why build another
signing platform.
Because the ones we could buy have no reason to know where they are. They will sign anything put in front of them, and the cost of that lands on the business holding the agreement — years later, when it is tested.
It knows the law here.
Written for South African law rather than translated into it. What the law excludes is refused with the statute named; what needs a hand is routed to wet ink and tracked. No competitor can answer this, because none of them are looking.
The sender is you.
Contracts leave from your own domain, so a client never receives an agreement from a company they have never dealt with. The relationship stays yours, all the way through the signature.
Evidence, not a log file.
Frozen at sending, hash-chained thereafter, with a certificate of completion attached to every finished document. Built for the moment someone asks you to prove it.
Deletion that is deletion.
Per-document keys mean destruction reaches the backups too, while the record of the destruction survives. That is what POPIA asks for, done properly rather than promised.
Put your agreements somewhere
that knows the rules.
Register your interest and we'll bring you in as Covenant opens up. In the meantime, Synapse and Nucleus — our documentation and support platforms — are already running.