Docusign Accelerates Intelligent Agreement Management with Lexion Acquisition

Update: The Docusign acquisition of Lexion is complete. Learn more here.

Key takeaways

• Docusign agrees to acquire Lexion, a leader in AI-powered agreement management software, for $165m in cash, subject to customary adjustments.

• Lexion’s advanced AI-based agreement technology streamlines and centralizes the contract process, speeding up drafting, negotiating, and reviewing agreements – with a set of solutions for creating automated workflows and extracting information from agreements, and an AI plug-in that puts the power of generative AI into Microsoft Word.

• Lexion’s co-founders met at the Allen Institute for AI, a leading research lab, and will join Docusign in product and engineering leadership roles. Lexion also brings to Docusign a team of world-class AI engineers with backgrounds at Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft along with a broader organization that has a deep understanding of the agreement management space.

• The acquisition bolsters Docusign’s position in Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), a new SaaS category, and will add more powerful AI capabilities to the Docusign IAM platform.

• Lexion’s products will continue to be offered and improved to Lexion’s hundreds of enterprise customers. In addition, these customers will have access to more functionality offered through the Docusign IAM platform.

Docusign announced it has agreed to acquire Lexion for $165m in cash, subject to customary adjustments. Lexion's powerfully simple agreement workflow platform has helped companies by using AI to streamline and centralize the contracting process. Lexion customers include in-house legal teams and users across sales, procurement, finance, marketing, HR, and more.

Lexion was founded by CEO Gaurav Oberoi, CTO Emad Elwany, and Principal Architect James Baird, who met at the Allen Institute for AI, a leading research lab created by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The Lexion co-founders will join Docusign within the product and engineering organizations: Oberoi will be a VP of Product Management, Elwany will be a VP of Engineering, and Baird will be a Principal Engineer.

Lexion provides targeted AI capabilities and experiences that will help Docusign accelerate our Intelligent Agreement Management vision. This includes bringing advanced document understanding capabilities, including contract reviews, negotiation, a Q&A experience, and more:

Richer insights and analysis: Docusign will be able to unlock customer insight to more critical information in their agreements to support day-to-day operations, answer relevant questions, and identify risks. Lexion technology will accelerate the pace of customers gaining a more granular understanding of their agreement structure, data, and attributes for a wider variety of contracts with better precision.

Lexion AI Contract Assist: This Word plug-in will substantially accelerate and intelligently assist in the contract review and negotiation process. Teams will be able to automatically review contracts for deviations and potential areas of risk from both first and third-parties. Where agreements don’t align to company standards or customized playbooks, the tool provides suggested revisions with AI-generated recommendations.

Answer agreement questions effortlessly: Lastly, Lexion technology will enable users to more seamlessly find information in their agreements, via the Q&A experience. Imagine being able to simply ask whether a contract includes an indemnification or warranty clause and have your question answered instantly, without scrolling through the whole document. 

Seamlessly manage intake: Lexion’s technology allows users to initiate tasks, provide approvals, and add comments simply via email, Microsoft Teams, or Slack. This seamless integration results in high adoption by the business, and a robust picture of agreement-related tasks in one place.

Looking ahead, together

Last month, Docusign announced a new category, Intelligent Agreement Management, and Docusign IAM, an AI-powered intelligent agreement management platform and new line-of-business applications to lead that category. Lexion’s deep AI and legal workflow expertise, along with our world-class Docusign AI team and scalable agreement platform, will be instrumental in realizing this vision and driving rapid innovation on an even larger scale going forward, allowing us to serve more customer user cases, industries, and sub-industries — sooner.

Customers today understand the potential of AI but many do not have the resources or knowledge to develop their own models in house. Docusign and Lexion customers will both benefit from the companies combining forces. Leveraging the Lexion team’s innovative AI models and expertise, Docusign will develop new capabilities to speed up contact creation, enhance negotiations, provide strategic insights across all agreements, and drive process automation. Lexion customers will also be able to do even more with seamless and more extensible integrations with Docusign solutions.

Docusign and Lexion have a shared vision of helping customers create, commit to, and manage agreements more efficiently and intelligently. Ultimately, our joint innovation — powered by AI — will deliver more value to customers, boost productivity, and simplify people’s lives.