Workday announced today that it is acquiring Evisort, an AI-powered contract management platform, for an undisclosed amount.
Evithought's technology will enable Workday to add a range of AI-powered document processing tools to its existing finance and HR software, Terrance Wampler, group general manager at Workday, said in a statement.
“Evisort helps realize our vision of helping customers unlock the value of their most important data,” said Wampler. “With AI-powered document intelligence, our customers can uncover and act on insights more quickly and efficiently.”
San Francisco-based Evisort was founded in 2016 by a team of researchers from Harvard Law School and MIT: Amin Anoon, Jake Sussman and Jerry Ting.
Currently, the startup offers an AI-powered module that allows customers to analyze documents such as revenue agreements, asset agreements, and supplier invoices for errors and omissions and get recommendations on document language.
Evisort is useful for highlighting key elements within documents, such as unbilled profits in supplier contracts, assessing document language against historical benchmarks, and automatically notifying customers of important upcoming dates (e.g. contract renewals).
Competition in the AI document tools space is fierce, but Evisort has found relative early success (despite a few security incidents) and has grown its customer base over the years, adding brands like Microsoft, Motley Fool, NetApp, and Vonage to its list of clients.
Evisort has raised $155.6 million in equity and debt from investors including TCV, General Atlantic, Vertex Ventures and Microsoft's corporate venture arm, M12, according to Crunchbase.
Evisort CEO Ting said Workday customers can expect Evisort's capabilities, including chatbots built to reference a company's knowledge base for things like human resources and financial policies, to be rolled into the Workday suite in the coming months.
“AI is a powerful force that is transforming how organizations translate unstructured data in documents into strategic business decisions,” Ting said in a press release. “We're excited to integrate Evisort's document intelligence technology with Workday's unified finance and HR platform, empowering our customers to better leverage their critical business data within a single system of truth.”
Workday expects the acquisition, its second this year after HR platform HiredScore, to close in the third quarter of fiscal 2025, subject to customary closing conditions.
Evisort adds to a string of AI-focused acquisitions for Workday that began with Identified in 2014. In 2018, the company acquired SkipFlag, a maker of an AI knowledge base that is automatically built from an enterprise's chats.
Overall, Workday has increased its investments in AI over the past few years, announcing that it will expand its Workday Ventures VC fund by $250 million in 2023 to back AI, machine learning, and automation ventures. Today, at the Workday Rising conference, Workday CEO Karl Eschenbach called AI a “tectonic shift” with “enormous potential” for the enterprise.