While DocuSign is reportedly considering a sale to private equity, it is acquiring a business itself.
On Monday, DocuSign announced the purchase of Lexion, a contracted workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The purchase comes as DocuSign increasingly invests in the contract management space, recently launching DocuSign IAM, a service aimed at connecting different components of the enterprise agreement creation and negotiation process.
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 Emad Elwany, former head of research software development engineering at Microsoft, and James Baird, an engineering veteran; Oberoi previously co-founded the survey platform Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey acquired shortly after its launch.
Lexion started as a “smart” repository for contracts, allowing legal teams to ask natural language questions about documents. But it has gradually grown with tools to address various use cases and document creation challenges for legal, sales, IT, HR and finance teams. .
Lexion had raised $35.2 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition from investors including Khosla Ventures, Madrona and Point72 Ventures.
According to DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Legion’s technology will enable DocuSign customers to gain a “more granular” understanding of their contract structures and data, as well as better identify potential information and risks. DocuSign will leverage Lexion’s AI models for contract creation and negotiations, while Lexion will create integrations with DocuSign’s products and solutions.
The purchase comes at a pivotal time for DocuSign, valued at approximately $12.5 billion, which is reportedly in the process of selling itself to a private equity firm. Perhaps in an effort to make its books more attractive to suitors, DocuSign announced plans in February to lay off about 6% of its workforce, or some 400 jobs.
Reuters reported in January that Bain and Hellman & Friedman were among the final bidders in an auction for DocuSign, which could be one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in 2024.
DocuSign’s other acquisitions include SpringCM (in July 2018 for $220 million), a cloud platform for sales contract management, and Seal Software (in February 2020 for $188 million), a company specializing in analytics AI-based contracts.
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