DocuSign Acquires Lexion

As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to private equity, it’s acquiring a company itself. DocuSign announced that it’s buying Lexion, a contract workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The purchase comes as DocuSign makes increasing investments in the contract management space, most recently launching DocuSign IAM, a service aimed at connecting different components of the corporate agreement creation and negotiation process. Lexion was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), the AI-focused research arm of the nonprofit Allen Institute. Gaurav Oberoi founded the company together with former Microsoft research software development engineering lead Emad Elwany and engineering veteran James Baird; Oberoi previously co-founded survey platform Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey acquired shortly after it launched.