DocuSign invests $15 million in AI contract discovery startup Seal Software to bolster its agreement cloud offering

DocuSign, is a company best known for its eSignature software with over 477,000 customers and hundreds of millions of users in over 180 countries worldwide. Over the years, however, the San Francisco, California-based company has expanded into document automation and agreement management. It has helped many organizations helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements.

As part of its strategic vision to expand beyond digital signatures, DocuSign announced today it’s investing $15 million in artificial intelligence startup Seal Software to accelerate the adoption of AI in analyzing agreements. The announcement came on the heels of launching the DocuSign Agreement Cloud—its suite of products and integrations for digitally transforming how organizations prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements.

DocuSign started its partnership with Seal Software early last year. The company started offering Seal’s artificial intelligence-based agreement discovery, extraction, and analytics solutions as a pre-integrated extension to its eSignature tool.

Founded in 2010 by CEO Ulf Zetterberg, Seal Software helps provides contract discovery and analytics software that uses machine learning and AI to find contracts across the network and extract contract data. Prior to Seal, Ulf held senior executive positions at companies like OpenText, Legato, EMC, Kazeon and Proact. Ulf studied Economics at Stockholm University. Seal Software has raised a over $43 million in funding over 5 rounds.

“AI lets organizations analyze their agreements for hidden risks and opportunities in new ways,” said Ron Hirson, chief product officer at DocuSign. “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.”

In a blog post, Seal Software CEO Ulf Zetterberg said: “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.”

“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,” said Ulf Zetterberg, co-founder and CEO of Seal Software. “Working together, we will continue to unlock the full potential of all the agreements that are pervasive across every size and type of business.”

Seal Software currently powers two DocuSign Agreement Cloud product extensions: DocuSign Total Search and DocuSign Intelligent Insights. Together, these enable DocuSign users to instantly and easily find agreements, regardless of their origin or storage location. Users can then compare sections of similar agreements to identify inconsistent contract terms, areas of exposure, and potential revenue leakage. They can also review auto-extracted terms and concepts to ensure compliance and minimize exposure to risk. These capabilities can help save companies millions of dollars while continuing to reduce corporate risk.