Dow Jones: EchoSign Raises $6m Expansion Round of Capital
EchoSign is pleased to announce it has raised a $6m expansion round of financing.
Dow Jones / VentureWire did a deeper dive, excerpted after the jump. To summarize, we raised the capital to ensure we can continue to innovate and not just keep up with our 2,000 customers and 150,000 users, but develop even more new features, new workflows, and new uses for EchoSign. TechCrunch's wrote a great summary here:
"Contract-management startup EchoSign
has just closed a $6 million round of financing, led by Emergence
Capital ... The basic service is free, but things like
extra document storage, encryption, and integration with Salesforce.com
require subscription upgrades that start at $12.95 a month. Paying
customers (there are more than 2,000) include British Telecom (with
over 2,700 sales reps using the service), GE, PayPal, Rite-Aid, Johnson
& Johnson, and even bail bondsmen
(you can fill out that bond application online next time your bad-seed cousin ends up in the slammer).EchoSign is one of the top-rated applications
on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. (Emergence was a venture investor in
Salesforce.com as well). Bigger sales teams tend to sign up on
Salesforce..com because EchoSign offers a way to track how the entire
team is doing in actually closing signed deals. EchoSign also works with Zoho and is a partner on WebEx Connect (WebEx’s answer to AppExchange), which just launched in private beta this week."
Dow Jones' interview after the jump.
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| Digital Signature Service EchoSign Inks $6M Series B | |||
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| EchoSign Inc.
has raised a $6 million Series B round of funding for its Web-based service for
acquiring digital signatures. Emergence Capital Partners led the funding with participation from Series A investor Storm Ventures. EchoSign previously raised $2.5 million. Emergence General Partner Jason Green will join the company's board of directors. Chief Executive Jason Lemkin said the funding will be used to expand sales and marketing efforts. Lemkin said he is pleased with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's accomplishments since it launched in beta in January 2006, but is anxious to improve the product. "The on-demand world is very hard," Lemkin said. "You end up with thousands of customers who always want new innovations and new features. And if it's a business product you have to deliver that with 100% reliability. On-demand business software is as challenging as it gets." When you send a document through EchoSign, the recipient opens the email, prints, signs and faxes back the document through a secure EchoSign fax number with a cover sheet automatically provided by EchoSign. "We offer Web 2.0 signatures," Lemkin said. "We automate getting contracts tracked and signed in one click." The company has a subscription-based revenue model with price points that range from $12.95 to $20 a month. Lemkin said the company currently has 2,000 paying customers and more than 150,000 users. Lemkin declined to discuss the company's revenue or valuation. "We're doing well," Lemkin said. "We didn't need to raise additional capital. We just elected to grow faster." | |||
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