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The DocuSign website is seen on a laptop in Dobbs Ferry, New York, April 1, 2021.

Tiffany Hagler-Geard | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Contract management platform DocuSign is committed to remaining a public company and is working to convince investors of its artificial intelligence potential, CEO Allan Thygesen told CNBC, after reports suggested the firm had been the target of takeover interest from private equity suitors.

“We’re focused on building a great, independent public company,” Thygesen told CNBC in an interview earlier this week at a partner event the company held in London. “I joined DocuSign as a public company, it’s a very exciting time right now, so that’s our plan.”

DocuSign, which offers a popular service that allows users to sign contracts digitally, was rumored to have been circled by suitors Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman, according to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg earlier this year citing people familiar with the matter.

Reuters and Bloomberg both reported the PE firms were dueling to buy DocuSign for almost $13 billion. According to a February Reuters report, Bain Capital and Hellman & Freshman paused their pursuit of DocuSign due to disagreements over how much they should pay to buy the firm.

CNBC has been unable to independently verify the reports.

Thygesen said he “can’t comment on anything that may or may not have happened in the past,” when asked by CNBC whether he could confirm rumors of PE buyers’ previous interest in DocuSign.

Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman were unavailable for comment when contacted by CNBC.

Thygesen added DocuSign wouldn’t rule out the prospect of an M&A (merger and acquisition) transaction in the future, telling CNBC: “In the future if something comes up — of course, you can never close the door on any transaction.”

However, he stressed: “We’re very focused on building a great independent company. We feel we have a huge opportunity, so that’s what we’re doing.”

In February, DocuSign announced plans for a restructuring of the business that included a decision to lay off 6% of its global workforce, with the bulk of the redundancies affecting sales and marketing functions.

The firm said it expects to take a $28 million to $32 million hit due to the restructuring plan, consisting primarily of cash expenditures for employee transition, notice period and severance payments, as well as non-cash expenses related to vesting of share-based awards.

DocuSign CEO: We're excited about our journey as an independent public company

At the time, DocuSign said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission it was taking these restructuring measures to “realize its multi-year growth aspirations as an independent public company.”

AI will have ‘profound’ impact

DocuSign has been trying to convince investors of an AI-driven future for the business, having made several notable announcements of products powered by the technology this year as well as a deal to buy Lexion, an AI-based contract management product, for $165 million in cash.

In addition, Thygesen has taken the company through an entire rebrand, changing its logo and refreshing the company brand.

He also announced a new DocuSign product focus called “Intelligent Agreement Management,” or IAM. IAM is a more automated version of DocuSign’s Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) process, which encompasses the journey of a contract from pre-signature activities to post-signature management.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang

“I think we have mostly convinced investors that there’s adults in charge, they’re ahead of the plan, that we’ve stabilized things, and now they want to see how we do with this new stuff,” Thygesen said.

“So we’re going to go and do that and, if we do that, we have a very exciting opportunity for shareholders, for customers, for employees, for everyone,” he added.

Thygesen said he expects AI to have a “very profound” impact “across industries, across functions, across sizes.”

“I feel privileged to be part of that in a company that I think is particularly well-positioned to take advantage of that,” Thygesen said. But, he added, “Even if I wasn’t, I’d be looking for where this is going to impact the business, no matter what business I was running.”

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OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model training

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OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model training

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo, Japan February 3, 2025.

Kim Kyung-hoon | Reuters

OpenAI has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Neptune, a startup that builds monitoring and de-bugging tools that artificial intelligence companies use as they train models.

Neptune and OpenAI have collaborated on a metrics dashboard to help teams that are building foundation models. The companies will work “even more closely together” because of the acquisition, Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź said in a blog.

The startup will wind down its external services in the coming months, Niedźwiedź said. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows,” OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a statement. “We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn.”

OpenAI has acquired several companies this year.

It purchased a small interface startup called Software Applications Incorporated for an undisclosed sum in October, product development startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in September and Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion in May.

Neptune had raised more than $18 million in funding from investors including Almaz Capital and TDJ Pitango Ventures, according to its website. Neptune’s deal with OpenAI is still subject to customary closing conditions.

“I am truly grateful to our customers, investors, co-founders, and colleagues who have made this journey possible,” Niedźwiedź said. “It was the ride of a lifetime already, yet still I believe this is only the beginning.”

WATCH: Sam Altman hits reset at OpenAI, pausing side bets to defend ChatGPT’s AI lead

Sam Altman hits reset at OpenAI, pausing side bets to defend ChatGPT’s AI lead

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Micron stops selling memory to consumers as demand spikes from AI chips

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Micron stops selling memory to consumers as demand spikes from AI chips

A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Micron said on Wednesday that it plans to stop selling memory to consumers to focus on meeting demand for high-powered artificial intelligence chips.

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”

Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is creating shortages for inputs like memory as a handful of companies commit to spend hundreds of billions in the next few years to build massive data centers. Memory, which is used by computers to store data for short periods of time, is facing a global shortage.

Micron shares are up about 175% this year, though they slipped 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.

AI chips, like the GPUs made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, use large amounts of the most advanced memory. For example, the current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192GB of memory per graphics processor. Google’s latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, needs 192GB of high-bandwidth memory.

Memory is also used in phones and computers, but with lower specs, and much lower quantities — many laptops only come with 16GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that tinkerers could use to build their own PCs or upgrade their laptops. Crucial also sold solid-state hard drives.

Micron competes against SK Hynix and Samsung in the market for high-bandwidth memory, but it’s the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts have said that SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary memory supplier.

Micron supplies AMD, which says its AI chips use more memory than others, providing them a performance advantage for running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, comes with 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.

Micron’s Crucial business was not broken out in company earnings. However, its cloud memory business unit showed 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.

Analysts at Goldman on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron’s stock to $205 from $180, though they maintained their hold recommendation. The analysts wrote in a note to clients that due to “continued pricing momentum” in memory, they “expect healthy upside to Street estimates” when Micron reports quarterly results in two weeks.

A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on whether the move would result in layoffs.

“Micron intends to reduce impact on team members due to this business decision through redeployment opportunities into existing open positions within the company,” the company said in its release.

WATCH: Winners and losers from surge in prices for memory chips

The winners and losers from the surge in memory chip prices

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Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

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Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

Microsoft: Have not lowered sales quotas or targets for salespeople

Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.

The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.

The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.

AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.

Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.

In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.

In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.

Read more CNBC tech news

“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.

The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.

But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.

The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.

Read the full story from The Information here.

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