Clause

What It Does

Clause built smart legal contracts — agreements with automated, data-connected clauses that can (but don’t have to) use blockchain to trigger actions and update contract state. The company founded the Accord Project, a non-profit standards body for smart legal contracts with members from large law firms. Clause is no longer an independent vendor.

What We Found

DocuSign acquired Clause on 27 May 2021 (terms undisclosed), taking Clause’s IP and folding most of its team into DocuSign’s engineering org with plans to migrate Clause’s products onto the DocuSign platform. DocuSign had earlier participated in Clause’s $5.5M Series A in 2019. CEO Peter Hunn led the company. Anyone evaluating Clause today should look at DocuSign’s smart-agreement / contract capabilities rather than a standalone Clause product.

What We Haven’t Verified

• Exact founding year (commonly cited as 2017; not confirmed from a primary source here).
• Headquarters and headcount at time of acquisition.
• Current state of the standalone clause.io product post-migration.

Company Info

• Sector: Legal Tech (smart contracts) — acquired by DocuSign (2021)
• Status: Product of DocuSign since May 2021