Technology

DocuSign chief says company wants to stay public after reports of private equity takeover interest

Published

2 years ago

May 22, 2024

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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.”

Technology

Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Published

3 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.

Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected

Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”

Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.

CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.

“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.

Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.

For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.

Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.

Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.

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Technology

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion

Published

4 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as .5 billion

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.

The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.

Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.

The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.

Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.

Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.

Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.

Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.

“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.

On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.

Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”

The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.

In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.

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