Pending acquisition of contract analytics pioneer to
bring full power of AI to the Agreement Cloud
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27, 2020 /CNW/ -- Reflecting the
increasingly important role that artificial intelligence (AI) will
play in the digital transformation of the agreement process,
DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU) today announced its intent to acquire one
of the leading contract analytics and AI technology providers, Seal
Software, for $188 million in
cash.
The news builds on the existing relationship between the two
companies. 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. DocuSign also made a
strategic investment in Seal in March last year.
With the acquisition, DocuSign can integrate Seal's technology
and value proposition more comprehensively across the Agreement
Cloud—and therefore deliver greater value to companies looking to
prepare, sign, act-on and manage the agreements that are critical
to their business.
Founded in 2010, Seal is recognized as one of the pioneers in
AI-driven contract analytics. Its technology can rapidly search
large collections of agreements by legal concepts (rather than just
by keywords); automatically extract and compare critical clauses
and terms side-by-side; quickly identify areas of risk and
opportunity; and deliver actionable insights that help solve legal
and business challenges.
"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."
There are many instances of companies already realizing the
benefits of leveraging Seal AI in their agreement processes today.
For example, one large international information-services company
reduced the time spent on legal reviews by 75% thanks to DocuSign
and Seal technologies. An international telecom company based in
EMEA reduced the legal review time on customer agreements by more
than 80%. A global financial services leader automated the analysis
of over 2.6M contractual data points
for critical supplier agreements. And a global aviation supplier
reviewed over 25,000 agreements in just five business days as part
of a corporate restructuring.
Once the acquisition has closed, DocuSign will continue to sell
Seal's analytics application. It will also integrate and leverage
Seal's AI technology to augment DocuSign CLM, one of the market's
leading contract lifecycle management solutions. This will help
DocuSign CLM 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.
For DocuSign customers, these capabilities will mean faster,
more efficient agreement processes. Seal customers will in turn
benefit from deeper access to the full capability of the DocuSign
Agreement Cloud—especially document generation and advanced
workflows.
Beyond CLM, DocuSign expects Seal's technology to make the AI
foundation of the Agreement Cloud smarter too. Built in part by
DocuSign's acquisition of technology from machine-learning startup
Appuri in 2017, that foundation supports features like auto-tagging
that are already offered today. These auto-tagging tools use AI to
automatically detect where to put electronic tags on a document for
signatures, dates, and other fields—a task that previously required
human effort and judgment. Seal's technology will add a new range
of AI capabilities, driven by advanced natural language processing,
text analytics, and semantic analytics.
Under the terms of the agreement, DocuSign will acquire Seal for
$188 million in cash (excluding the
value of shares currently owned by DocuSign), subject to
customary purchase price adjustments. The acquisition has been
approved by the board of directors of DocuSign and Seal, and by the
stockholders of Seal. Subject to customary closing conditions,
including expiration of the waiting period under the
Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, the acquisition is
expected to close in the first half of DocuSign's fiscal year.
Seal will be featured at DocuSign's annual customer, partner and
developer conference, DocuSign Momentum, held on March 4th in San Francisco. For more information, visit
docusign.com or seal-software.com.
Media Relations:
Adrian Wainwright
Head of Communications
media@docusign.com
Investor Relations:
Annie Leschin
VP Investor Relations
investors@docusign.com
About DocuSign
DocuSign helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare,
sign, act on, and manage agreements. As part of the DocuSign
Agreement Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature: the world's #1 way to
sign electronically on practically any device, from almost
anywhere, at any time. Today, more than 560,000 customers and
hundreds of millions of users in over 180 countries use DocuSign to
accelerate the process of doing business and to simplify people's
lives.
For more information, visit www.docusign.com
About Seal Software
Seal Software is the global leader in enterprise contract
analytics. With Seal's machine learning and natural language
processing technologies, companies can use artificial intelligence
to find and organize contracts across their networks and
repositories and to quickly understand the risks and opportunities
hidden in their contracts. Seal empowers enterprises around the
world to maximize revenue opportunities, reduce costs, and mitigate
risks associated with contractual documents.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements related to
DocuSign, Seal and the acquisition that are based on our
management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently
available to management. These statements are subject to
substantial risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results
to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such
statements. Forward-looking statements include all statements that
are not historical facts and can be identified by terms such as
"will," "expects," "believes," or "continue" or the negative of
these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our
expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. Forward-looking
statements in this press release include, among other things,
statements about the potential benefits of the transaction, our
ability to develop our Agreement Cloud platform and deliver product
innovation, new products and potential market opportunities, the
parties' ability to satisfy the conditions to closing, and the
timing for the expected closing of the transaction. Risks and
uncertainties include, among other things, risks related to our
ability to consummate the proposed transaction on a timely basis or
at all, including due to the satisfaction of the conditions to
consummation of the proposed transaction; our ability to secure
regulatory approvals on the terms expected, in a timely manner or
at all; our ability to successfully integrate Seal's products,
technologies and operations; our ability to realize the anticipated
benefits of the proposed transaction, including the possibility
that those benefits will not be realized when anticipated, or at
all; disruption from the transaction making it more difficult to
maintain business and operational relationships; the outcome of any
legal proceedings related to the transaction or otherwise; the
negative effects of the announcement or the consummation of the
proposed transaction on the market price of our common stock or on
our operating results; significant transaction costs; and unknown
liabilities.
Additional risks and uncertainties that could affect our
financial results are included in the sections titled "Risk
Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial
Condition and Results of Operations" in our quarterly report on
Form 10-Q for the quarter ended October 31,
2019 filed on December 6, 2019
with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), and other
filings that we make from time to time with the SEC. In addition,
any forward-looking statements contained in this press release are
based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this
date. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update
these forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons if
actual results differ materially from those anticipated in the
forward-looking statements.
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SOURCE DocuSign, Inc.