- DocuSign Inc (NASDAQ: DOCU) recently announced it acquired Liveoak Technologies today for approximately $38 million. These are the details.
DocuSign Inc (NASDAQ: DOCU) recently announced it acquired Liveoak Technologies today for approximately $38 million. Liveoak Technologies is known for offering online notarization services.
In the same announcement, DocuSign also revealed a new product called DocuSign Notary. DocuSign Notary is expected to fulfill notary requirements — which is especially essential for the stay at home orders associated with the pandemic. And DocuSign Notary is a new product in the Agreement Cloud suite that focuses on remote online notarization (RON) where audio-visual technology is used to complete a notarial act when the signers and the notary public are in different places.
Plus DocuSign Notary will enable notarized transactions via video (something increasingly supported by U.S. states’ legislatures and executive orders). And DocuSign Notary will also augment the company’s existing eNotary offering, which enables a notary public to act as an in-person witness to the electronic signing of documents. DocuSign Notary is expected to be available for early access later this summer.
Liveoak and DocuSign were already partners prior to the acquisition. With that partnership, DocuSign eSignature was integrated with Liveoak’s secure agreement-collaboration platform. Liveoak uses web-based videoconferencing, rich collaboration features, identity verification, and other tools to help complete an auditable transaction remotely. And it counts some of the world’s largest financial institutions as customers.
Going forward, DocuSign will continue to offer Liveoak’s platform for remotely completing other assisted agreements like account openings or virtual inspections that require in-person facilitation and an audit trail.
Liveoak Technologies originally launched in 2014 and it raised about $13.5 million in funding since then. The acquisition was an all-stock transaction.
Key Quotes:
“DocuSign is practically synonymous with the electronic completion of agreements from almost anywhere, on almost any device. But there is an important class of high-value agreements that require the live participation of a notary or other representative. With this acquisition, we intend to bring the DocuSign experience to those agreements too—so signers and those assisting can get business done no matter where they are.”
-DocuSign COO Scott Olrich
“Given the state of technology today, people often wonder why they still need to sign any document in-person—and the pandemic has only exacerbated this concern. We’ve been working to solve this very issue for years, and we’ve had a strong partnership with DocuSign as a result. By joining forces and fully integrating our solutions now, we can bring the ease and simplicity of DocuSign to the execution of notarized and other complex assisted agreements.”
-Liveoak CEO Tim Ramza
