XML pioneer Jean Paoli’s startup Docugami acquired by Inveniam after open-source partnership
Inveniam, a company that uses blockchain to help investors verify the data behind assets such as commercial real estate and private loans, has acquired Docugami, the AI document startup led by XML co-creator Jean Paoli. All of Docugami’s employees are joining Inveniam, and Paoli becomes its chief product and technology officer. Read More
Docugami, the Seattle-area startup led by XML co-creator Jean Paoli, has been acquired by Inveniam, a Detroit-area company that uses blockchain to help investors verify the data behind assets such as commercial real estate and private loans.
The deal follows a partnership this summer in which the companies released DGML, Docugami’s open-source format for turning business documents into data that AI agents can use and check.
Financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. All of Docugami’s employees are joining Inveniam, a Docugami spokesperson said. The team numbers about 50 including contractors. Paoli becomes Inveniam’s chief product and technology officer, and Docugami will keep operating from Kirkland, according to the announcement.
Paoli co-founded Docugami in 2018 after more than 20 years at Microsoft, where he helped create XML and the Office file formats.
The startup, based in Kirkland, Wash., raised a $10 million seed round in 2020 led by SignalFire, with backing from Bob Muglia, the former Microsoft executive and Snowflake CEO. Grammarly, the writing-assistant company now known as Superhuman, later disclosed that it had taken part in the round, its first investment in another company.
Prior to the acquisition, Docugami ranked No. 155 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the Pacific Northwest’s top independent, privately held startups.
DGML labels each piece of a document by what it is — a base rent, a loan payment, a liability cap — so a single figure can be traced back to the page it came from. Inveniam records a digital fingerprint of each of those data points on its blockchain, called NVNM Chain, so any later change shows up.
Inveniam executives said Thursday morning on a livestream with Paoli that DGML solves a problem they’ve had in bringing on new clients: every client’s documents are different, which required templates and standard formats before the data could be used.
“One promise I want to make personally: DGML stays open and its openness is strategic to Inveniam,” Paoli wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Inveniam, led by CEO Patrick O’Meara, also acquired Mantra, a crypto company that provided the original technology for NVNM Chain, earlier this year. Mantra co-founder John Patrick Mullin said on the livestream that NVNM Chain will move to its own independent blockchain, with the main network expected to launch in the next few weeks.
Fees on that network will help fund buybacks of an NVNM cryptocurrency token, Mullin said. O’Meara proposed a separate session on when that token will launch.
