Osborne Clarke advises the shareholders of natif.ai on the takeover by DocuWare

Osborne Clarke has advised the shareholders of natif.ai, a provider of document automation, on the takeover by document management and workflow automation specialist DocuWare. 

The Saarbrücken-based start-up natif.ai, founded in 2019 by Manuel Zapp, Johannes Korves, Christophe Hocquet and Bérenger Laurent, originated in the sphere of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and is currently active in the intelligent document process automation (IDP) segment. Using AI models and a deep OCR (short for optical character recognition) developed in-house, natif.ai's solution can analyse documents particularly quickly and extract relevant data from them.

Over the past few years, 468 Capital, redalpine, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and F-LOG Ventures, among others, have invested around EUR 6 million in natif.ai. Now DocuWare, a wholly owned, independently operating subsidiary of Ricoh, has announced the acquisition of natif.ai. The provider of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions describes natif.ai as one of the most innovative start-ups in the German technology landscape and wants to emphasise its vision for the future with the acquisition by integrating natif.ai's AI technologies into its platform. The company expects this to significantly expand its competitive advantage in the ECM environment.

“We are excited to take this giant leap forward and become a part of the DocuWare Group,” said the two managing directors Johannes Korves and Manuel Zapp. “These are exciting times, and we are excited to be a part of the change.”

“We are very pleased that we were able to accompany natif.ai and its shareholders on this exciting journey and now, after advising them in several financing rounds, we were also able to support them in the exit,” says Rouven Siegemund, VC Partner at Osborne Clarke. Dr Philipp Reeb, M&A Partner at Osborne Clarke, adds approvingly: “This transaction represents another highlight for our transaction group, in particular because it is further proof of how the combination of our transaction expertise with our exceptionally high level of cross-sector AI expertise enables us to provide excellent advice to our clients.”

The Osborne Clarke team that advised the shareholders of natif.ai, led by Dr Philipp Reeb (M&A) and Rouven Siegemund (VC), consisted of Charlotte Raszawitz (née Mager) and Julian Baldus (both M&A), Fabian Mimberg and Benedikt Hülsmann (both VC), Florian Merkle and Patrick Seiler (both Tax), Dr Tobias Rothkegel (Data Protection), Dr Hendrik Schöttle and Beata Völker (both IT), Dr Philipp Raben (Labour Law) and Dr Sebastian Hack (Antitrust Law).