Contract-management startup EchoSign has just closed a $6 million round of financing, led by Emergence Capital. Previously, the company had raised $2.5 million from Storm Ventures.
EchoSign is a Web-based service that lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The service has attracted 144,000 users (the vast, vast majority are not paying). The basic service is free, but things like extra document storage, encryption, and integration with Salesforce.com require subscription upgrades that start at $12.95 a month. Paying customers (there are more than 2,000) include British Telecom (with over 2,700 sales reps using the service), GE, PayPal, Rite-Aid, Johnson & Johnson, and even bail bondsmen (you can fill out that bond application online next time your bad-seed cousin ends up in the slammer).
EchoSign is one of the top-rated applications on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. (Emergence was a venture investor in Salesforce.com as well). Bigger sales teams tend to sign up on Salesforce..com because EchoSign offers a way to track how the entire team is doing in actually closing signed deals. EchoSign also works with Zoho and is a partner on WebEx Connect (WebEx’s answer to AppExchange), which just launched in private beta this week. Competitors to EchoSign include DocuSign and Negonation.
TechCrunch first wrote about EchoSign back in January, 2006.