DocuSign acquires AI-powered contract management firm Lexion

As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to non-public fairness, it’s buying an organization itself.

On Monday, DocuSign (which now prefers to go by Docusign, with a lowercase “S,” a PR rep from the corporate tells me) introduced that it’s shopping for Lexion, a contract workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The acquisition comes as DocuSign makes growing investments within the contract administration area, most lately launching DocuSign IAM, a service geared toward connecting totally different parts of the company settlement creation and negotiation course of.

Lexion was incubated on the Allen Institute for Synthetic Intelligence (AI2), the AI-focused analysis arm of the nonprofit Allen Institute. Gaurav Oberoi based the corporate along with former Microsoft analysis software program improvement engineering lead Emad Elwany and engineering veteran James Baird; Oberoi beforehand co-founded survey platform Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey acquired shortly after it launched.

Lexion started as a “good” repository for contracts, letting authorized groups ask pure language questions on paperwork. Nevertheless it slowly expanded with instruments to deal with numerous use circumstances and challenges in doc creation for groups throughout not solely authorized departments, however gross sales, IT, HR and finance.

Lexion had raised $35.2 million in enterprise capital previous to the acquisition from buyers together with Khosla Ventures, Madrona and Point72 Ventures.

In keeping with DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Lexion’s know-how will allow DocuSign prospects to realize a “extra granular” understanding of their contract constructions and information, in addition to higher determine insights and potential dangers. DocuSign will faucet Lexion’s AI fashions for contract creation and negotiations, whereas Lexion will construct integrations with DocuSign’s merchandise and options.

The acquisition comes at a pivotal second for DocuSign, valued at about $12.5 billion, which is claimed to be within the strategy of promoting itself to a personal fairness agency. Maybe in a bid to make its books extra engaging to suitors, DocuSign in February introduced plans to put off ~6% of its workforce — some 400 jobs.

Reuters reported in January that Bain and Hellman & Friedman are among the many last bidders in an public sale for DocuSign, which may very well be one of many largest leveraged buyouts in 2024.

DocuSign’s different acquisitions embody SpringCM (in July 2018 for $220 million), a cloud platform for gross sales contract administration, and Seal Software program (in February 2020 for $188 million), an organization specializing in AI-driven contract analytics.