DocuSign Welcomes Team and Tech from Appuri
A large part of my day-to-day role as Senior Vice President of Engineering at DocuSign, involves identifying the best approach to tackling the hard problems in technology – always in a way that makes us effective at meeting our business objectives and delighting our customers.
With that in mind, we’re increasingly seeing businesses collecting and analyzing data for product and service improvements, customer behavior insights, and artificial intelligence intelligence.
At DocuSign, we have over 200 million users and more than 300,000 customers worldwide. At that scale, we produce a lot of data about our services and how customers interact with them. And, the more companies bet on DocuSign as the platform to manage their digital transactions, the more likely it is that they will want advanced reporting and analytics capabilities to help identify and improve how they execute their agreements.
But the question is, how do you bring insights about the processing of agreements without knowing the details of the process or of the agreements themselves? The answer is the large-scale analysis of transactional patterns, enabled by machine learning.
The same underlying technology is helpful in delivering a better software as a service experience too. We invest heavily in monitoring our services and emit billions of points of operational exhaust. By making better use of it at scale, we can understand how different types of users experience DocuSign and target improvements that will make our applications easier to use and help our customers be more productive.
To help solve this pattern analysis problem, DocuSign has been working on a pilot project for the past few months with Appuri, a machine learning and data platform startup here in Seattle.
Appuri was founded to help companies engage their customers the right way at the right time – from enabling more intelligent front-line conversations to delivering perfectly-targeted marketing messages and product experiences.
When we first started working with the Appuri team, we quickly recognized the underlying value in their machine learning platform. We also really liked the domain knowledge and approach their development team brought to the project.
We saw customer focus, innovation at scale, intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn from others. I’d like to think that describes how DocuSign tackles problems too, and it was reflected in the way Appuri worked with us. So it quickly became clear that there was an excellent fit for accelerating our product goals, and enhancing our workforce.
That’s why today I’m proud to confirm that DocuSign has entered into an agreement to acquire the IP rights and hire the majority of the employees from Appuri. We’re all excited about this move, and it means we can begin to accelerate the delivery of advanced analytics within our DocuSign products and business processes.
I’m looking forward to everything we can do with the Appuri team on board!
-Tom
