Why Box Is Buying SignRequest For $55 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Feb 4, 2021
  • Box, Inc. (NYSE:BOX) recently announced that it entered into a definitive agreement under which Box will acquire SignRequest for $55 million. These are the details.

Box, Inc. (NYSE:BOX) recently announced that it entered into a definitive agreement under which Box will acquire SignRequest, a cloud-based electronic signature company. And Box had also previewed Box Sign, an e-signature capability that will be developed on SignRequest’s technology and natively integrated into Box.

Box Sign is expected to be included in Box business and enterprise plans, enabling customers to modernize the way they work and digitize important processes while ensuring their agreements can be securely managed and governed in the Box content cloud.

As 2020 was marked an unprecedented transition in the way people live and work. And across every industry, the way businesses need to operate has increasingly moved online. Content underpins nearly all the mission-critical business processes, from closing deals with sales proposals and contracts to getting new products to market faster with innovative designs and manufacturing specs, to securely onboarding new customers and employees.

Over 100,000 businesses, including 69% of the Fortune 500, already use Box to create, share and govern their content in the cloud. The addition of SignRequest and the introduction of Box Sign will make it easy for customers to have access to simple, secure electronic signatures natively integrated into Box where their content already lives.

SignRequest complements Box’s existing capabilities and its modern, easy to use product fits with Box’s core design principles. Box Sign will inherit Box’s industry-leading security and governance capabilities, thus helping customers reduce IT spend, eliminate content silos, and facilitate legal and regulatory compliance.

The Box content cloud provides businesses with a secure platform for managing all of their content in the cloud, making it simple to collaborate from anywhere, automate workflows, and keep their data secure and compliant. And with the addition of e-signatures, Box customers will be able to manage the entire content lifecycle in the cloud, turning their valuable content into tangible results. From the moment a file is created to when it is shared, edited, published, approved, signed, classified, and retained, the entire content lifecycle can now happen in the Box content cloud.

Many of the business processes the Box content cloud drives for customers today will be accelerated by the addition of Box Sign.

– Legal teams will be able to create and finalize contracts within Box, from drafting and co-editing the contract to signing and retaining the agreement with Box Governance, eliminating version control issues and the costs to use third party e-signature tools.

– HR teams can initiate and complete offer letters using Box

– Relay with Box Sign, streamlining the hiring and onboarding process for new or seasonal employees.

– Sales teams can initiate customer contracts for signature with Box Sign right from Salesforce with Box being the secure content layer for everything – from pitch decks to executed agreements.

– Compliance teams can retain and protect executed agreements directly within Box, securing sensitive content with granular access controls and threat detection using Box Shield.

– Marketing teams can securely and easily collaborate with external agencies on confidential ad-campaigns from creating the project brief to the legal-approved statement of work.

Box Sign is expected to be generally available in the summer of this year and its native e-signature capabilities are expected to be included in Box business and enterprise plans with additional functionality like e-signature APIs available at an incremental cost. And SignRequest will also continue to operate and be available to both current and new SignRequest customers through signrequest.com.

This acquisition is anticipated to close in Box’s first fiscal quarter ending on April 30, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions. And Box will pay an aggregate purchase price of $55 million. 

Upon the closing of the deal, SignRequest will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Box. And the SignRequest team is expected to join Box and will begin integrating SignRequest with Box to develop Box Sign.

KEY QUOTES:

“The past year has fundamentally shifted the way we work, pushing businesses to move critical processes to the cloud. Streamlining digital transactions is integral to digitizing business and the e-signature category is ripe for disruption. We’re thrilled to welcome SignRequest to our team. For the past several years, we’ve been building the leading content cloud, enabling some of the world’s largest and most regulated organizations to secure, manage, and collaborate on their valuable information. Adding e-signature with Box Sign extends our vision for the content cloud and will help our customers accelerate their digital transformation.”

— Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box

“The last year has shown us that we can effectively work virtually and that we don’t need to rely on in-person meetings to get business done. Our mission is to build the most intuitive e-signature technology in the market and we are very excited to join the Box family to scale that vision in the enterprise. Marrying our powerful and affordable e-signature solution with Box’s enterprise-grade content platform will help digitize more transactions.”

— Geert-Jan Persoon, CEO of SignRequest

“E-signature is a large, high-growth market. With less than one-third of organizations deploying digital authorization because of cost barriers and legacy solutions, work is slowed down by paper-based signatures. Over 100,000 customers already use our platform to power the way they work, and we believe that by making electronic signature capabilities native to our core offering with Box Sign we will drive incredible value for our customers — speeding up and simplifying workflows, lowering security and compliance risk – while cutting costs.”

— Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer at Box

“In 2021, organizations will need to develop and implement long-term technology strategies to address the lasting impacts of the shifts we’ve seen this past year. Box’s content cloud will play a key role in helping businesses manage the entire content lifecycle in one secure location.”

— Holly Muscolino, Research Vice President, Content and Process Strategies and the Future of Work, IDC