A sudden epidemic has not only quickly stimulated the market demand for e-signatures, but also pushed up the degree of favor of the capital market for the track once again.
Recently, e-signature announced the completion of 1 billion yuan of Series D financing, led by Shenzhen Venture Capital, Evergrande Hi-Tech Group and Dazhen Financial Intelligence, and followed by Farwing Investment, Vanchuang Capital and other institutions such as Gobi Venture Capital and Tongheng Zheshang Capital.
Comprehensive data shows that this is the largest amount of financing in the electronic signature industry, before the Series D round of financing, e-SignPal has received a total amount of more than 855 million yuan in financing.
eSignPal revealed that this round of financing will be used to continue to increase investment in product and technology research and development, focusing on signing and contract and ecological layout around this, and scale up the popularization of electronic contracts.
By the end of June 2020, e-SignPal has served more than 5.02 million enterprise users, with more than 270 million individual users, and the cumulative volume of signature has exceeded 12.1 billion times, with an average daily volume of more than 20 million times.
According to relevant research reports, e-SignPal accounts for 36.36% of the overall market of China’s Internet electronic signature market, occupying the first place.
Capital influx
Public records show that eSignPal officially completed its first round of funding in September 2015, and since then, almost every year, eSignPal has had a new round of funding come in. So far, eSignPal has completed five rounds of financing. It is no exaggeration to say that the financing history of e-signature treasure is also the development process of the e-signature track in the capital market.
In fact, before e-signature treasure completed the first financing, e-signature treasure is not short of money, is a rare company in the market without external financing to make a profit.
In 2014, the Internet showed the development trend of moving to the Internet and cloud. e-signature treasure held a meeting of directors to formally determine the future development direction of e-signature treasure: first, from the electronic signature software company to transform the electronic signature cloud service company; second, to establish the electronic signature + strategy, oriented to the Internet + application market, to empower the digital transformation and upgrading of various industries; third, accept external venture capital to accelerate development.
It was this meeting that made e-SignPal realize that to take advantage of the e-signature trend, it was not enough to have an All in team. Since then, e-signature began to accept external venture capital investment to accelerate its development.
But at that time, e-signatures were not yet hot, everything was just starting state, e-signature treasure founder and CEO Jin Hongzhou recalled that the financing in 2016 was quite difficult. “The initial financing was not easy, looking for a lot of investment institutions, the other side either can not understand, or think that it does not work.”
But the good news is that after several months of searching and contacting, finally, we found Eastern Fuhai and Clear Control Ginkgo, which have the same values. The investors saw the future growth of e-signature, didn’t hesitate much, and directly took out 45 million yuan to enter as a Series A investor. It was also because of this financing that eSignPal started to emerge in the electronic signature circuit and eventually ran to the position of an industry leader.
As one of the leading investors of the Series D round, the person in charge of investment of Shenzhen Venture Capital said, there is huge space in the electronic signature industry, the paperless and online contracts are the global trend, and the electronic signature itself is cross-industry and universal, which is the last link of informationization and the only entrance to intelligent contracts, and its development is expected.
Epidemic accelerates, E-signatures run wildly
If the board meeting in 2014 was the turning point of e-signature strategy, this year’s epidemic “black swan event” allowed many industry companies to test the e-signature application, educate users and make the e-signature track really hot.
During the epidemic, demand skyrocketed and application scenarios became increasingly widespread. In the early days of the epidemic, e-signature treasure launched “e up forward billion plan”, divided into “e up forward of the epidemic commitment letter plan”, “e up forward of the remote office plan”, “e up forward of the remote office plan”, “e up forward of the epidemic commitment letter plan”, “e up forward of the epidemic commitment letter plan”. The three major initiatives of “eStart’s Solution Assistance” support SMEs to tide over the difficult times.
In response to the surge in the number of customers during the epidemic, e-SignPal launched the blockchain contract, namely the financial version of the solution 2.0. It is understood that the financial version of the solution 2.0 is based on the e-SignPal blockchain contract, especially for the financial service scene to upgrade, hoping to more effectively serve the banking industry, financial leasing industry, commercial factoring industry, fund industry, insurance industry and other scenarios, to help digital transformation. It solves the problem of online digital services, making signature smarter, more reliable and more secure.
In addition, in response to the special needs created by the epidemic, e-Sign Bao provides enterprises and society with various online signature documents such as “certificate of return to work and resume production” and “commitment letter of the epidemic”, etc. The scenarios include the government requiring enterprises to submit materials with seals and signatures of employees, communities requiring owners to sign relevant materials, and schools requiring parents to sign relevant materials when enterprises resume work.
In addition, like buying and selling houses “cloud purchase”, the economic zone around the screen to screen “cloud signing” such scenarios, can be realized. e-signature in this year’s market expansion speed, which makes the electronic signature in the public’s overall perception, the electronic signature itself, the social and environmental protection of the public. The value is highlighted.
Dazhen Caixiang is one of the leading investors in this round of financing of e-signature, before that, despite the systematic scanning and industry research on the e-signature industry since the second half of 2016, Dazhen Caixiang has not made an investment.
The epidemic at the beginning of the year drove the country’s intensive online policy, for the enterprise and personal level customer education cycle is greatly shortened, making the original may take 3-5 years to build the corporate mind and consumer mind, get a certain degree of shortening, the industry penetration rate has increased to a large extent.
“The state strongly supports the industry, and after the new crown epidemic, the industry entered the fast track of development. After the epidemic, the Ministry of Social Affairs clearly can use electronic forms of written labor contracts. Under the promotion and support of national policies and regulations, the market space for e-signing is huge.” Dazhen Finance and Wisdom corporate services industry related official said.
In addition, e-SignPal has served the leading enterprises in the subdivision track and accumulated a lot of successful experience in industry customization and SAAS, and the team is pragmatic and hard-working, which are the reasons why e-SignPal is very optimistic.
Create a closed-loop service: “once signed, lifetime service”.
E-contracts are no longer as simple as signing online as they used to be.
According to different industry pain points, e-signature platform provides customized solutions and one-stop service is particularly important.
Founded in 2002, as an early entrant to the electronic signature platform, e-SignPal has been exploring the industry for a long time to form a set of electronic contract lifecycle services, from electronic signature to contract management, from certificate of deposit preservation to legal services, e-SignPal is committed to becoming a lifelong contract steward for users.
“Once signed, lifelong service”, this is the image of eSignPal when describing a set of completed electronic contract life cycle services. Specifically, eSignPal provides a full range and full process of services through lifetime customer service, solutions, project implementation, emergency response, product training, value-added services and legal services, enabling customers to quickly access professional service support for any product- and service-related issues at any time.
With nearly 18 years of service in the e-signature market, e-signature also has a perfect ecological service system, leading and complete ecological service capabilities, and customized solutions covering the whole industry. With the extension of application scenarios, e-Signature’s current services can provide full coverage, and its comprehensive solutions are the first to realize G+B+C, connecting government services, business services and terminal services.
For the e-signature track, ensuring data security is the foundation of its development and growth. In this long-distance race track, e-Signature has formed a relatively high barrier in many aspects.
All along, the e-Signature security team has made continuous efforts in infrastructure trusted computing, network security architecture, application security protection and other aspects, and is committed to building a “safe and reliable” e-signature platform. Based on the self-developed product technology, e-SignPal combines Ant Chain, Dharma Academy, Aliyun and other technologies, as well as judicial services, which has brought great innovation to the product.
Behind the deep-rooted technology, the recognition of the industry has gradually increased. It is understood that in April this year, based on its technical capability in the management and protection of personal privacy security, e-SignPal obtained ISO/IEC 27701:2020 certification, becoming the first e-contract platform in China to be certified by the standard.
At present, e-Signature has gained a number of top clients including Alibaba, Sony, Huaxia Bank, Hikvision, Geely, Budweiser, and Tencent.
In the 5G era, the e-signature track is growing upwards
In the digital era, the digital economy has become an important engine for economic development, with the expansion of the market and the increase in the cost of employment driving the demand for electronic signatures. At the same time, with the continuous improvement of the industry chain in China’s e-signature market, the e-signature platform service further extends to the entire life cycle of signing, and the service field penetrates into various industry sectors.
According to iiMedia Research (AiMedia Consulting), in 2019, the scale of China’s electronic contract signing times was as high as 27.89 billion times, a year-on-year growth rate of 317.5%, and is expected to exceed 50 billion times in 2020.
E-contracting is the trend.
With the development and maturity of blockchain, artificial intelligence, 5G and other technologies, and the onlineization of businesses in various industries, e-signatures will gradually become one of the underlying infrastructures of the entire business.
Yan Yun, vice president of Evergrande High-Tech Group, said that mobile networks and smart mobile devices are becoming more and more popular, and we have entered the SaaS era. At present, big data and cloud computing have provided the foundation for electronic signing, and blockchain technology has also ensured that the data is authentic and the legal validity of electronic contracts is ensured. In the future, with the advent of the Internet of Things and the acceleration of 5G commercialization, the electronic contracting market will be a blue ocean.
It’s also very optimistic about the future development of electronic signatures. It’s not just a matter of time, it’s also a matter of time. China’s electronic signature penetration rate to improve the space is broad, but also to further empower the judicial service process, effectively improve the social legal level, reduce social transaction costs, compliance costs, judicial costs, in China’s economy from incremental to stock, from foreign trade oriented to the internal cycle of the double cycle, effectively for China’s state-owned enterprises and private enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
At the end of the interview, Mr. Jin Hongzhou, founder and CEO of e-Signature, said, “We have been driving the entire electronic signature industry to do popular things to make everyone in China change their signing habits, which is a process from paper signing to electronic signing. Contract stewards.”
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