DocuSign acquires Seal Software for $188M to enhance its AI chops

Contract management service DocuSign today announced that it is acquiring Seal Software for $188 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close later this year. DocuSign, it's worth noting, previously invested $15 million in Seal Software in 2019.

Seal Software was founded in 2010, and, while it may not be a mainstream brand, its customers include the likes of PayPal, Dell, Nokia and DocuSign itself. These companies use Seal for its contract management tools, but also for its analytics, discovery and data extraction services. And it's these AI smarts the company developed over time to help businesses analyze their contracts that made DocuSign acquire the company. This can help them significantly reduce their time for legal reviews, for example.

"Seal was built to make finding, analyzing, and extracting data from contracts simpler and faster," Seal Software CEO John O'Melia said in today's announcement. "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 says it will continue to sell Seal's analytics tools. What's surely more important to DocuSign, though, is that it will also leverage the company's AI tools to bolster its DocuSign CLM offering. CLM is DocuSign's service for automating the full contract life cycle, with a graphical interface for creating workflows and collaboration tools for reviewing and tracking changes, among other things. And integration with Seal's tools, DocuSign argues, will allow it to provide its customers with a "faster, more efficient agreement process," while Seal's customers will benefit from deeper integrations with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.