SignEasy plans to raise up to $5 mn in funding

It is a San Francisco-based startup that offers software-as-a-service mobile-first solution to electronically sign and fill documents from any digital device

SignEasy, a San Francisco-based start-up that offers software-as-a-service mobile-first solution to electronically sign and fill documents from smartphones, tablets and web, is planning to raise anywhere between $3 million and $5 million (about Rs 32 crore) in a Series-A round of funding.

“We are seeing a lot of in-bound interest from venture capitalists. We are hopeful of closing a deal in the next six-nine months. We propose to deploy the funds for strengthening our technology and develop new platforms,” SignEasy’s founder and chief executive officer Sunil Patro, told Business Standard. Patro, an IIT-Kharagpur graduate, had worked in Microsoft and Juniper Networks in the US.

Founded in 2010 in San Francisco, SignEasy has a 20-staff-strong global product development centre in Bengaluru.

“Being a bootstrapped company, we realised that hiring top talents to build a rockstar team in the Valley is quite expensive. To leverage the cost arbitrage, we shifted our development operations to Bengaluru in 2011,” he said.

After joining the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme in mid-2013, SignEasy focused on monetising its product to generate cash flows. With a premium monetisation model where the company charges $5 for 10 documents per occasional user, and $40 and $80 per user a year for pro-users and business users, respectively, SignEasy has been profitable for the last four years, Patro said.

The SignEasy app is currently available on the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore and BlackBerry App World. The company has seen over three million downloads of the app since its launch in July 2010, with almost half the downloads being from the US.

According to Patro, India ranks 10th in downloads across all countries for SignEasy with 20 per cent downloads from Asia. Together, SignEasy's users had so far processed five million documents, and are on track to process three million documents this year alone.

"We are planning to expand our product line and offer small and medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprises more features to include in their internal and external workflows, besides looking at creating a sales, marketing and product development team in the US to fast-track this process within the next six months," Patro said.