Box Announces Intent to Acquire E-Signature Innovator SignRequest

Previews Box Sign: native electronic signature capability to help customers digitize business processes

Box, Inc. announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement under which Box will acquire SignRequest, a cloud-based electronic signature company. Box 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.

“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,” said Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box. “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.”

“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,” said Geert-Jan Persoon, CEO of SignRequest. “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.”

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Box Sign to streamline digital transactions

2020 marked an unprecedented transition in the way people live and work. Across every industry, the way businesses need to operate has increasingly moved online. Content underpins nearly all of 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.

More than 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 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, ultimately helping customers reduce IT spend, eliminate content silos, and facilitate legal and regulatory compliance.

“E-signature is a large, high-growth market,” said Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer at Box. “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.”

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Box Sign to create the complete content cloud for the enterprise

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. 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’s 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. For example:

• 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 will be able to initiate and complete offer letters using Box Relay together 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 will be able to retain and protect executed agreements directly within Box, securing sensitive content with granular access controls and threat detection using Box Shield.
• Marketing teams will be able to securely and easily collaborate with external agencies on confidential ad-campaigns from creating the project brief to the legal-approved statement of work.

“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,” said Holly Muscolino, Research Vice President, Content and Process Strategies and the Future of Work, IDC. “Box’s content cloud will play a key role in helping businesses manage the entire content lifecycle in one secure location.”

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