Docusign Buys Generative AI Legal Services Startup Lexion for $165M

AI-powered contract and legal tech startup Lexion has been acquired by electronic agreement services provider Docusign for $165 million. DocuSign plans to incorporate Lexion’s suite of tools into its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) and is bringing much of Lexion’s team on board to continue their work.

Lexion DocuSign

Lexion incorporates AI to streamline contract setup, execution, and management. The startup began embedding generative AI into its portfolio with the release of the AI Contract Assist plugin for Word, built on OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) and fine-tuned on contract language and related legal data. The assistant is capable of explaining, negotiating, and adjusting contracts through informal conversation. Most of Lexion’s executives will take up leadership roles at DocuSign as part of the deal. Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi, CTO Emad Elwany, and Principal Architect James Baird are joining DocuSign’s product and engineering teams.

“We share a vision of smarter agreement management and our joint AI-powered innovation will deliver increased value, productivity, and simplicity to our combined customers,” Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen explained. “This strategic acquisition underscores our commitment to providing our customers with Intelligent Agreement Management solutions that will transform agreement data into insights, accelerate contract reviews, and boost productivity to ultimately grow revenue faster.”

Integrating Lexion’s technology will augment DocuSign’s IAM platform and offer deeper insights from agreements, and more efficient contract reviews and document handling. DocuSign will leverage Lexion’s AI models to enhance contract creation, negotiation processes, and gain strategic insights. Meanwhile, Lexion’s customers will benefit from seamless integrations with DocuSign’s solutions, ensuring continued improvement and support for Lexion’s products.

“While we’ll continue to support our existing services, our users will also gain access to new, innovative features as we integrate more deeply with DocuSign’s capabilities,” Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi wrote in a blog post. “From our early days at the Allen Institute for AI, our team has dedicated the past five years to harnessing natural language processing technology to revolutionize document comprehension and workflows. This has led to rapid growth, supporting hundreds of enterprise customers and showcasing the size of the opportunity and business need. To look forward to that work taking a global stage through Docusign’s customer base is both rewarding and exhilarating.”

Lexion raised about $35 million ahead of its acquisition, including a $20 million round about a year ago. Demand for generative AI tools for legal services is only accelerated since. For instance, Spellbook, formerly Rally, raised $20 million in January and more than $30 million in total. Generative AI professional services startup Harvey went from a $5 million round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund at the end of 2022 to an $80 million round a year later.

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