At DocuSign headquarters in San Francisco, near the city’s waterfront with sweeping views of the Bay Bridge, visitors are greeted by a mural of a signature on an aquamarine wall. It’s not the signature of anyone in particular; company reps say they don’t know who it belongs to. On a nearby wall, a framed plaque commemorates National E-Sign Day (June 30, 2010), a congressional holiday that celebrates the law passed a decade earlier that made e-signatures legally binding.
But soon, that mural will be painted over as part of a shift at DocuSign, which is trying to move beyond its roots as a company that processes digital signatures to one that manages all the contracts that support a company’s business.
“The strength of DocuSign is that we're known and trusted for e-signature,” CEO Allan Thygesen told Forbes. “And that can also be a limiter.”
On Thursday, the company announced a new suite of tools, which it calls its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform, aimed at making it easier to notarize documents, generate new contracts and analyze vendor agreements to see who hasn’t been delivering. It’s also rebranding: The S in DocuSign will now be lowercase in its new logo, a symbolic gesture.
This is more than just a product launch for Docusign. The company views it as an entirely new platform. Inside Docusign, executives describe it with phrases like “reinvention,” “second act” and a “relaunch of the company.” President of growth Robert Chatwani likened it to what the Salesforce CRM did for modernizing sales operations. Chief product officer Dmitry Krakovksy claims it will do for contracts what GPS did for paper maps. Docusign says it’s inventing a new category.
And the company is betting that the opportunity is enormous. $2 trillion in economic value is lost per year due to outdated contract systems, according to a Deloitte study Docusign commissioned, where the consultancy surveyed more than 1,000 contract managers across 10 countries. The lack of a platform to search and store contracts also adds to a time suck: an average of 25,000 hours a year are wasted in several business functions including legal, sales and human resources. It also takes an average of two weeks longer to close a big deal or hire top talent than it would with smarter systems, according to Deloitte.
“The strength of DocuSign is that we're known and trusted for e-signature. And that can also be a limiter.”
A pandemic darling, Docusign is among a cadre of companies — like Netflix, Instacart and Zoom — that flew high amid Covid lockdowns. As the world quarantined at home, e-signatures became a vital part of keeping the economy going, and the market rewarded it. Docusign stock spiked more than 600% from summer 2019 to its high of $310 in September 2021. “There’s a joke around here,” said Chatwani. “There were two things people bought during the pandemic: One was toilet paper, and the other was Docusign.” Rebecca Denman, senior director of product management and a 10-year veteran of the company, remembers the rush. “It was 24 hours a day,” she said. “I was doing support calls.”
But just like its fellow pandemic stars, Docusign’s stock came back to earth as lockdowns ended and things got back to business as usual. The stock has stabilized recently, hovering around $60, but the company needed to expand its market in a post-pandemic world. “Both the opportunity and the necessity to rekindle higher growth is what's driving this,” Thygesen said.
The IAM platform consists of three products: Navigator, Maestro, and App Center. Navigator is a repository that lets companies store and manage all of their contracts. From there, companies can use AI to run analytics on their contracts as a whole, allowing them to spot inconsistencies across contracts, weed out underperforming vendors or better negotiate deals by uncovering trends. (For example, a major tech company was able to reduce spend in one department by 10% by consolidating contracts and getting volume discounts from vendors, Krakovsky said.) Maestro helps customers to build out workflows for users, combining various contract features like e-signature, ID verification and data verification from third-party apps. Finally, the App Center lets users integrate outside services into the system, including Stripe for payments or HubSpot for customer information.
For AI smarts, Docusign is using a combination of proprietary models and OpenAI’s GPT-4. The launch comes as companies everywhere — and enterprise firms in particular — try to infuse their products with AI. McKinsey estimates generative AI’s boost on productivity could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in value annually to the global economy, enabling automation of up to 70% of business activities across almost all occupations by 2030.
At launch, customers will be able to deploy the IAM platform specifically to certain parts of their business, including sales or customer experience. Docusign will add functionality for more business areas later, including procurement, human resources and financial services. Right now, the company has thousands of existing customers beta testing the new platform for free, including real estate company Coldwell Banker and lifestyle blog Apartment Therapy. Pricing will vary depending on the specific IAM application the client purchases, ranging from $35 to $120 a seat.
“There’s a joke around here. There were two things people bought during the pandemic: One was toilet paper, and the other was Docusign.”
Founded in 2003 by entrepreneurs Court Lorenzini, Tom Gonser and Eric Ranft, Docusign is a remnant of the early Web 2.0 era — founded a year before Facebook and five years after Google. Through the years, the company cycled through several CEOs, even reportedly having trouble finding someone to take the top job at one point. In 2017, Docusign hired Dan Springer, former CEO of the SaaS marketing company Responsys, who took the company public a year later.
Thygesen took over after the pandemic subsided. He grew up in Copenhagen, coming to the U.S. in 1986 to attend Stanford University’s MBA program. He joined Google in 2010, leading advertising marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses. He eventually ascended to lead Google’s $100 billion North and South American ad business. Thygesen left the tech giant in 2022 to join Docusign, still struggling after the pandemic pop. By then, Springer had stepped down after business had stalled, with the company appointing board chair Maggie Wilderotter to interim CEO. Old colleagues from Wink Communications, a video marketing company based in London, Thygesen emailed Wilderotter asking about the permanent CEO gig. While the company was on a back foot, he thought it still had strong “bones,” he said. Once at Docusign, he made building out IAM a top priority.
The issue, though, may be attracting new customers, said Holly Muscolino, a vice president that covers the future of work at the research firm IDC. Docusign, an IDC client, briefed Muscolino on the IAM tools ahead of launch.
While the new platform culls several features together in a convenient way, it might not be enough to pry clients away from their existing workflows. “The risk is that it's a relatively mature market,” said Muscolino. “Even though this is new packaging, and it may help organizations do this end-to-end automation, they're not introducing capabilities that most organizations don't already have in some form.” For example, e-signature is a “commodity” that several companies offer, she said, including Adobe, Dropbox and Zoho.
The whole package will be part of the attraction, said Thygesen, and being able to keep track of a trove of contracts will be a boon for companies. “Once an agreement is signed, it goes into a deep, dark place. It used to be a filing cabinet, now maybe a digital file folder,” he said. “Agreements, I think, are one of the final frontiers of enterprise software.”
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