DocuSign is reportedly considering selling to private equity, and is also acquiring companies itself.
On Monday, DocuSign announced it would acquire contract workflow automation startup Lexion for $165 million. The acquisition comes as DocuSign is increasing its investments in the contract management space, recently adding DocuSign IAM, a service aimed at connecting the various components of the enterprise contract creation and negotiation process. It has started.
Lexion was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), the AI-focused research arm of the nonprofit Allen Institute. Oberoi founded the company with his lead Emad Elwani, a former Microsoft research software development engineer, and engineering veteran James Baird. Oberoi previously co-founded the survey platform Precision Polling, which was acquired by SurveyMonkey shortly after its launch.
Lexion began as a “smart” repository for contracts that enabled legal teams to ask questions about documents in natural language. But over time, we've expanded by providing tools that address a variety of document creation use cases and challenges for teams across sales, IT, HR, and finance, as well as legal departments.
Prior to the acquisition, Lexion had raised $35.2 million in venture capital from investors including Khosla Ventures, Madrona and Point72 Ventures.
According to DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Legion's technology will give DocuSign customers a “deeper understanding” of contract structures and data to better identify insights and potential risks. DocuSign leverages his Lexion's AI models for contract creation and negotiation, and Lexion builds integrations with his DocuSign products and solutions.
The acquisition comes at a critical time for DocuSign, which is valued at about $12.5 billion and is said to be in the process of selling itself to a private equity firm. Perhaps to make its books more attractive to suitors, DocuSign announced plans in February to lay off up to 6% of its workforce, or about 400 people.
Reuters reported in January that Bain and Hellman & Friedman were among the final bidders in the DocuSign auction, which could be one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in 2024. Reported.
DocuSign's other acquisitions include SpringCM, a cloud platform for sales contract management (for $220 million in July 2018), and Seal Software, a company specializing in AI-driven contract analysis (for $220 million in July 2020). $188 million per month).