documentation has announced the acquisition of Lexion, a provider of AI-powered contract management software, in an all-cash transaction valued at $165 million. The purchase is meant to strengthen Docusign's position in Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), an area the corporate entered last month. But Lexion isn't going away – at the very least not yet. According to Docusign, Lexion's products will proceed to be available and even improved to tons of of enterprise customers who already use the software.
Founded in 2019 by Gaurav Oberoi, Emad Elwany and James Baird on the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), Seattle-based Lexion offers a natural language processing system that converts contract text into structured data. It is then deployed to a repository with search, reports, alerts, permissions, and integrations. The startup competes with Cortical, Pactum, LinkSquares, Evisort, Contractbook and Agiloft. Oberoi, Elwany and Baird will join Docusign in senior product and engineering roles.
“We share the vision of smarter contract management and our joint AI-powered innovation will deliver value, productivity and ease to our mutual customers,” Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen said in an announcement. “This strategic acquisition underscores our commitment to providing our customers (IAM) solutions that transform contract data into insights, speed up contract reviews and increase productivity to ultimately grow revenue faster.”
Docusign is already announcing among the latest features its IAM platform will support when it integrates Lexion's technology. These include providing customers with greater insight into their contracts and providing an AI-powered plugin for Microsoft Word to help with contract development, in addition to making it easier to seek out information in contracts through a Q&A experience and managing document receipts via email and Microsoft Teams or Slack.
“Our shared vision with Docusign is to revolutionize the way in which agreements are created, managed and analyzed for organizations world wide,” noted Oberoi. “We will drive innovation and deliver greater value to each Docusign and Lexion customers, alongside a broader organization that has a deep understanding of the contract management space.”
Lexion has raised greater than $35.2 million in enterprise funding from Madrona Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Citi Ventures, Point72 Ventures and law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
