DocuSign, the maker of electronic signature technology, has raised $47.5 million in equity financing, according to a SEC filing released today. Terms of the deal and investment firms were not listed in the filing, though it did note that Mary Meeker is now serving as a director of the company. Meeker is the well-known Morgan Stanley investment analyst and current partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers whose investments include Twitter, Square and others.
She had not been listed on the company’s board previously.
UPDATE: In an interview with GeekWire, DocuSign CEO Keith Krach confirmed the $47.5 million investment and the involvement of Kleiner Perkins as the lead investor. In addition to KPCB, Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures and an undisclosed “large global institutional” firm joined as new investors.
“We are really poised for growth,” said Krach, adding that in many circles the word DocuSign is becoming a verb. “We’ve got a great business model that is a hybrid of SAAS and Internet, and we really believe that in the second half of this decade the vast majority of signatures will be electronic. We are in the midst of building a great company.”
The new funds will be used for R&D and international expansion, as well as for a “deep dive” into existing industries where e-signatures are becoming more commonplace. DocuSign has about 200 customers in Europe, and roughly 20 million users worldwide.
The total amount that could be raised as part of the round is $56 million. Krach declined to disclose revenues, only saying that they have been growing significantly in recent quarters.
Tech veteran and former Ariba CEO Krach took the helm at the company last summer marking the third CEO in two years. The 270-person company is now split between San Francisco and Seattle, with about half of the staff in Seattle. The headcount has doubled in the past year, and Krach said it will likely grow beyond 300 staffers by the end of 2012.
Asked about a possible IPO, Krach said that’s not the primary effort at the moment.
“Our objective is to build a great sustaining company. We’d look at an IPO as kind of a financing event,” he said. “Our focus is on growing the business, so we have not set any timetable or anything like that.”
DocuSign faces competition against Adobe, which last year purchased rival EchoSign for undisclosed sum.
Krach, who said the biggest challenge in the business remains scaling it worldwide, downplayed the impact of the Adobe acquisition on the market.
“It has pretty much been the same,” he said. “We continue to gain market share out there with these big customers. We are focused.”
Krach added that the product is going from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” in big organizations, citing the adoption by H-P which recently announced plans to roll out the service to its 300,000 person workforce.
Other investors in the company include Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, Frazier Technology Ventures and Salesforce.com. DocuSign raised a $27 million round in December 2010, and with the latest cash infusion the company has raised $115 million to date.
“The eSignature market is at an inflection point and going mainstream,” Krach said in a press release at the time of his appointment last year. “With DocuSign’s world-class team, we are poised for incredible growth in the coming years.”
[This post has been updated with comments from DocuSign]
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