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E-signature company DocuSign announced Thursday afternoon that it had reached an agreement to acquire the AI-based contract analytics provider Seal Software for $188 million in cash. The deal has been approved by both DocuSign and Seal's board of directors, with the acquisition expected to close in the first half of DocuSign's fiscal year.

Seal's software, which allows users to search collections of agreements by legal concepts and automatically extract or compare clauses and terms for analysis, has garnered attention from investors over the years. In June 2018, venture capital firm Toba Capital forked over $30 million in capital to help Seal continue its growth and product development.

But this isn't the first time that the company has crossed paths with DocuSign. Last March, DocuSign invested $15 million in Seal to help drive deeper intelligence and AI capabilities within its own Agreement Cloud Suite. Following the acquisition, those features will be expanded to include natural language processing, text analytics and semantic analytics. Meanwhile, DocuSign will continue to sell Seal's contract analytics application.

In the news release announcing the acquisition, DocuSign's chief operating officer Scott Olrich emphasized the draw of Seal's AI-based software. "We believe that AI will play a vital role in this transformation. And by integrating Seal into DocuSign, we can benefit from its deep technology expertise and its broad experience applying AI to agreements."

Changes also appear to be in store for DocuSign's Contract Lifecycle Management solution, which will be augmented with Seal's AI tech to facilitate the automatic categorization of clauses and the ability to extract key terms. This in turn would be used to route content to specific reviewers depending on a risk analysis and corporate policies.

"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," said John O'Melia, Seal's chief executive officer.