Having become Seal Software’s first corporate investor in March last year with a $15m injection, New York Stock Exchange-listed eSignature giant DocuSign has announced its intention to acquire the contract analytics and AI technology provider for $188M in cash.
DocuSign already resells Seal’s flagship analytics and machine learning application as part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud—its suite of applications and integrations for automating and connecting the entire agreement process. This acquisition will cement that integration.
Seal will also augment DocuSign CLM, its contract lifecycle management solution. DocuSign says that this will help it to automatically categorize clauses, extract their key terms, and then use that information to drive workflows—for example, automatically routing content to specific reviewers based on risk analysis and corporate policies.
DocuSign in 2018 unveiled its vision to modernize the way companies across the globe manage their agreements. “We’re on a mission to make the world more agree-able by transforming the foundational element of business: the agreement process,” said CEO Dan Springer.
Shortly after that statement, DocuSign acquired cloud-based document generation and contract lifecycle management software company SpringCM for around $220m in cash.
Founded in 2010, Seal can rapidly search large collections of agreements by legal concepts (rather than just by keywords); automatically extract and compare clauses and terms side-by-side; and quickly identify areas of risk.
“As the Agreement Cloud company, DocuSign is about digitally transforming the very foundation of doing business: agreements and agreement processes,” said Scott Olrich, DocuSign’s chief operating officer. “We believe that AI will play a vital role in this transformation. And by integrating Seal into DocuSign, we can benefit from its deep technology expertise and its broad experience applying AI to agreements.”
John O’Melia, Seal’s chief executive officer, added that today’s news both validates and extends the company’s founding vision. “Seal was built to make finding, analyzing, and extracting data from contracts simpler and faster,” he said. “We have a natural synergy with DocuSign, and our team is excited to leverage our AI expertise to help make the Agreement Cloud even smarter. Also, given the company’s scale and expansive vision, becoming part of DocuSign will provide great opportunities for our customers and partners.”
See also: https://legaltechnology.com/docusign-invests-15m-in-seal-software/