American e-signature giant DocuSign has threatened legal action against Spryngtime, a similar product created using Swedish AI-powered app builder Lovable.
DocuSign is a US-based listed tech company valued at around $15bn, which offers a subscription service for companies to manage digital contracts.
According to a LinkedIn post by Lovable founder Anton Osika, DocuSign sent a letter saying Spryngtime’s work is in violation of its intellectual property and other rights. DocuSign said it has “significantly invested in its innovation for nearly two decades and is vigilant in policing its well-established intellectual property.”
Spryngtime, built over a period of two days using Lovable, ChatGPT and Cursor, is a platform for managing digital contracts and signatures — and according to the site, it is similar to the product offered by DocuSign. It is also free to use.
In the legal letter DocuSign writes it has found that the site is spreading “false and misleading statements regarding DocuSign”, including statements that appear to put DocuSign’s “services as inferior” to the startup “based on false facts”.
DocuSign writes that it considers this matter “very serious” and asks for the registrant, Michael Luo, to cooperate to stop this immediately.
Spryngtime is not the first, nor the last site that will end up receiving threatening letters from big tech.
“We've seen a growing wave of SaaS tools being disrupted by apps built with Lovable and AI — though most of them don't end up in legal disputes,” Osika tells Sifted.
We've changed the name of dev mode because we're friends with Dylan on figma.
Swedish AI agent Lovable has also been faced with warnings, such as when Figma threatened Lovable over the use of the term ‘Dev Mode’ in a trademark row in April.
“As for the 'Dev Mode' naming issue, we've since changed it,” Osika says, adding that the decision was made because they are friends with Figma CEO Dylan Field.
Although all software built by AI app builders, such as Lovable and Cursor, may not beat big tech’s services, they have shown that there is a large demand for cheap or free software.
Lovable, which usually charges for its app-building services, offered free app building the weekend before last and the upswing was evident. Osika later posted that over 250k apps had been built during that weekend.
Sifted has reached out to DocuSign and Michael Luo for comment.
This article has been updated on June 24 with comments from Anton Osika.
