San Francisco based provider of electronic signature and digital transaction management services, DocuSign, announced that it has invested $15 Million in Seal Software. Seal Software is a seal contract discovery and analytics startup that uses machine learning to find and parse contracts.
This move follows DocuSign’s acquisition of intellectual property rights from machine learning startup Appuri in December 2017, and its purchase of text search and document indexing startup SpringCM in September 2018. Seal Software was founded in 2010 by Kevin Gidney and Ulf Zetterberg. The company recently reported a more than 85& year-on-year growth.
“We are thrilled by DocuSign’s confidence in Seal Software as a partner and now as a strategic investor, as we build the next generation of agreement discovery and analysis tools using artificial intelligence,” Seal Co-Founder and CEO Ulf Zetterberg said. “Working together, we will continue to unlock the full potential of all the agreements that are pervasive across every size and type of business.”
“DocuSign’s strategic investment into Seal signifies a validation of their choice of technology partner for the Manage phase of the Agreement Cloud. On another, it is a sign of DocuSign’s ambition to move the management of agreements (or in our vernacular, contracts), from a back-office, database-centric function to an open, cloud-based front-office centric design in which the entire agreement process is integrated and frictionless. Elements of the process have been addressed before with tools such as Contract Lifecycle Management systems, authoring tools, digital signatures and so on, but this is the first offering that brings all these together in the cloud,” Zetterberg added.
Per the agreement which was inked last year, Seal’s technologies are distributed through DocuSign’s platform extensions program. They underlie DocuSign’s Total Search service, which allows customers to centralize and organize digital agreements using metadata and search inside them using natural language terms, as well as DocuSign’s Intelligent Insights, which taps AI algorithms to automatically extract “mission-critical” legal concepts like indemnification and warranty.
“AI lets organizations analyze their agreements for hidden risks and opportunities in new ways,” said DocuSign’s Chief Product Officer Ron Hirson. “As we have continued to invest in adding intelligence to our suite of products, this investment in Seal’s discovery and analytics is just another step in making our Agreement Cloud offering smarter.”
To date, DocuSign has raised more than $500 Million. As of February, the company had 450,000 customers and “hundreds of millions” of users spanning across more than 180 countries.
