DocuSign adds 45,000 customers in a single quarter

Digital signature company DocuSign added 45,000 customers over the last quarter – over 500 per day -- taking its total client base to over 1.4 million.  

In an earnings call the company said its Q1 revenue hit $661 million, up 12% year-on-year, despite macroeconomic headwinds slowing its growth.

DocuSign's growth comes as various industries look to move away from the bottleneck of "wet ink" signatures. For example in 2020, the UK's HM Land Registry began accepting electronically signed property transfer deeds.

(The first property deal using a "Qualified Electronic Signature" that does not require a physical witness to the signing took place in 2021.)

Outgoing CFO Cynthia Gaylor credited the stellar customer acquisition to DocuSign's focus on "easy-to-use, high-ROI products."

The call comes weeks after DocuSigns released a new "Web Forms" offering which lets customers dynamically populate content into agreements for signature, with low-code drag-and-drop capabilities to build custom forms and speed up document generation.

CEO Allan Thygesen said the company was seeing "strong traction for Web Forms across verticals, including financial services, real estate, healthcare, and life sciences" – and during the quarter had joined SAP's "Endorsed Apps" programme for validated integration with the ERP firm's tools.

DocuSign leadership changes

Outgoing CFO Gaylor is being replaced at the financial helm of the company by Blake Grayson, former CFO, International Consumer, Amazon. Grayson's hire is one of a number of leadership moves at DocuSign, which has also hired former Workday CISO Kurt Sauer as its new security chief and Google veteran Dmitri Krakovsky as its new CPO.

DocuSign already boasts of the world's largest set of agreement data and plans to leverage this to further reform  its contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems.

With increasing legal clarity vis-a-vis what qualifies as an e-signature, more rigorous encryption and authentication measures are being put in place by firms. DocuSign itself has added an ID verification system to its product roster -- allowing it to expand further into the EU market with its new offering of an EU qualified e-signature.

The European Union states that a qualified e-signature has the same legal recognition as a handwritten signature, and requires that "it be uniquely linked to and capable of identifying the signatory; created in a way that allows the signatory to retain control and linked to the document in a way that any subsequent change of the data is detectable."

The EU also requires that a qualified e-signature is created by a qualified signature creation device (QSCD) and is based on a qualified certificate for electronic signatures.