DocuSign to acquire AI-powered platform provider Seal Software for $188M in all cash deal

DocuSign has announced its intent to acquire the contract analytics and AI technology provider Seal Software for $188 million in an all-cash.

Founded in 2010, California based Seal Software is the prominent provider of data extraction, contract discovery, and analytics. The has raised a total of $58M in funding over 6 rounds to date, according to Crunchbase.

With the help of this acquisition, DocuSign can integrate Seal technology and value proposition across its Agreement Cloud – and thus deliver value to companies looking to prepare, sign, act on and manage the agreements that are much more critical to their business.

Executive Opinion

DocuSign's chief operating officer, Scott Olrich, said, "As the Agreement Cloud company, DocuSign is about digitally transforming the very foundation of doing business: agreements and agreement processes. 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."

Seal's chief executive officer, John O'Melia, said, "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."

DocuSign's plans for Seal Software

After the completion of the acquisition, DocuSign will continue to sell Seal’s analytics application.

DocuSign intends to integrate Seal's AI/ML technology across its Agreement Cloud. In March 2019,  DocuSign invested in Seal Sofware. DocuSign also offers Seal's flagship analytics and machine learning application as part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, notes the announcement.

It also plans to leverage Seal’s AI technology to augment DocuSign CLM, its contract lifecycle management solution. Once integrated it will automatically categorize clauses, extract their key terms and then use that information to drive different workflows.
With the help of Seal Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies, companies can find contracts of any file across their networks, quickly understand what risks or opportunities are hidden in their contracts and place them in an encrypted centralized repository, notes the announcement.