Today, it will acquire , which develops artificial intelligence-powered contract discovery and contract management software solutions, for $188 million.

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The companies are certainly not strangers to each other, considering DocuSign strategically put $15 million into Seal last March. Since it was founded in 2010, Walnut Creek, California-based Seal has raised . Prior to the corporate round raised last year, Seal鈥檚 most recent financing was a $30 million capital infusion from .

DocuSign also has been reselling Seal鈥檚 flagship analytics and machine learning application as part of , a suite of applications and integrations designed to automate 鈥渢he entire agreement process.鈥�

鈥淭he news marks DocuSign鈥檚 next bold move in AI and cements the company鈥檚 path to digitally transform the foundation of doing business: agreements and agreement processes,鈥� DocuSign said in its press release. 鈥淲ith the acquisition, DocuSign has firmly made a bet on AI as the future of agreements and will now integrate Seal鈥檚 technology, which makes finding, analyzing and extracting data from contracts simpler and faster, more comprehensively across the Agreement Cloud.鈥�

Once the acquisition has closed, San Francisco-based DocuSign plans to continue to sell Seal’s analytics application. It will also integrate Seal’s AI technology to augment , its contract lifecycle management solution.

Chief Operating Officer Scott Olrich said DocuSign聽has more than 3,700 employees. Seal Software has around 240 employees, about half of whom are in the United States.

“Given our history of reselling Seal Software鈥檚 agreement analytics solution鈥攁nd our broader vision to help companies automate their entire agreement process鈥攚e knew that AI would play an increasingly important role in the future,” Olrich wrote via email. “By acquiring Seal, we can now integrate its AI technology across our entire solution suite, and we can benefit from their deep technology expertise, and their broad experience applying AI to agreements.”

The companies claim that incorporating AI into the contracts and agreements process helps save time and money. For example, they point to 鈥渁 large international information-services company鈥� that 鈥渞educed the time spent on legal reviews by 75 percent thanks to DocuSign and Seal technologies.鈥� Another customer, they claim, reduced the legal review time on customer agreements by more than 80 percent.

The acquisition marks DocuSign鈥檚 in its lifetime, according to SA国际传媒 data. Its last purchase was the $220 million acquisition of Chicago-based in 2018.

In December, DocuSign third-quarter fiscal 2020 revenue of $249.5 million, up聽40 percent year over year. Subscription revenue was $238.1 million, an increase of 41 percent year over year while professional services and other revenue was $11.4 million, an increase of 28 percent year over year. Its generally accepted accounting principles net loss per basic and diluted share was 26 cents on 178 million shares. But its non-GAAP net income per diluted share was 11 cents on 191 million shares outstanding compared.

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Good Monday morning, and welcome back to work. There’s a lot going on today including a small selloff in cryptos, a very global cut of new venture rounds — the six largest venture rounds in the past 24 hours hail from five different countries — and the stock market is set to shed about 60 basis points when it opens.

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But the real news that matters in startupland is that has gone shopping. Indeed, the San Francisco-based file-centric productivity company that it is acquiring , an e-signature company, for $230 million in cash.

That’s a lot of money for a company that hadn’t raised聽that much in venture聽capital. Let’s unpack the deal a bit.

Money And Money

Let’s start by examining the dollar situation at each company.

Dropbox’s most recently reported quarter is . At the end of that particular period, the well-known Silicon Valley unicorn had $1.04 billion in cash and equivalents. That means the $230 million HelloSign deal will consume over 20 percent of its known cash. The real impact will be lower, however.

Why? In the third quarter, Dropbox reported free cash flow of $120 million. Presuming that Dropbox didn’t see its business deteriorate sharply during the fourth quarter of 2018, it generated cash since we last saw its numbers. Thus, it had more than $1.04 billion on-hand with which to buy HelloSign. The real impact, therefore, of the deal on Dropbox’s checking account is more muted than it appears if we measure from its third-quarter results.

On the HelloSign side of things, the cash abundance turns into a cash dearth. SA国际传媒 has for HelloSign, but only one with a dollar amount, from June of 2017. That’s just under 20 months ago, meaning that HelloSign likely had spent its available funds to grow (venture-backed companies traditionally burn through a raise in 18 months or so, and then raise more off the strength of their recent growth), and may have faced a raise-or-sell moment.

With ample competition in the market, including Adobe Sign and the recently-public , perhaps HelloSign felt it might fit better into a platform. I can see the logic in that. Also, a $16 million Series B likely didn’t value the smaller company at over $100 million, making the deal a better than 2x return for its latest investors.

So Dropbox can afford the deal, and HelloSign likely finds the exit inviting. Why did Dropbox write the check?

Revenue Growth

Dropbox’s of $360.3 million was up 26 percent from the year-ago period. Dropbox’s of $339.2 million was up 27 percent from the year-ago period. Dropbox’s revenue was $316.3 million, up 28 percent from the year-ago period.

You can see the trend: Dropbox’s growth is slowing. And in SaaS, like any business category, growth is a revenue-value amplifier. The faster your business grows today, the more it may be worth in the future. Thus, investors are willing to pay more for growth-y revenue than less growth-y revenue, everything else held static.

HelloSign likely doesn’t have enough recurring revenue to reverse Dropbox’s revenue growth declines in its present form, but the smaller company’s products can be sold into Dropbox’s extant customer base and could add a juicing element to future contract values. If HelloSign manages to do much of that, it could help Dropbox’s growth story.

Which would be welcome at the file-focused firm. According to Google Finance this morning, Dropbox is worth $9.72 billion before the markets open. That’s a huge sum, but still lower than on the popular service. More growth might help Dropbox get closer to that figure.

Top Image Credit: .

2018 is hot for IPOs, doubly so in contrast to the last few lackluster years. Yes, , and , and 2017 were disappointments of varying degree for venture capitalists and employees alike who were hoping that long-held shares might shake loose from the private market.

But the fourth time’s the charm, I suppose and 2018 may make up for some lost time. To that point, a few companies have managed to go public this year that stood out from the normal springtime enterprise IPO cycle.

Indeed, we’ve seen some famous unicorns finally go public in 2018, and it’s been annoyingly satisfying to write some conclusory notes concerning companies that spent more time in the shadows than perhaps anyone might have anticipated.

But how are they doing now, with a little bit of time on public markets? Let’s quickly take a peek at a few unicorn IPOs that we have seen this year and how they are holding up:

• Dropbox
  • IPO price: $21
  • Price today: $30.10
  • Percent change: +43.33 percent
• Spotify
  • IPO price: N/A; reference price set at $132.
  • Price today: $161.03
  • Percent change: +21.99 percent
• Zuora
  • IPO price: $14
  • Price today: $19.62
  • Percent change: +40.14 percent
• DocuSign
  • IPO price: $29
  • Price today: $38.69
  • Percent change: +33.41 percent
• Pivotal Software
  • IPO price: $15
  • Price today: $18.42
  • Percent change: +22.8 percent
• iQiyi
  • IPO price: $18
  • Price today: $18.35
  • Percent change: +1.94 percent
• Bilibili
  • IPO price:
  • Price today: $10.40
  • Percent change: -9.6 percent

All but one of the companies I felt were big enough to warrant mention today are up. Not bad.

Some of the above names are less well-known, I admit. But it is critical for us at SA国际传媒 News, and everyone, really, to keep eyes on China’s startup market. There is so much money flowing through the world of Chinese venture that it’s nigh-staggering.

The scale of that cash and the value creation it implies (through spiraling valuations, and so forth) is a global story. And, therefore, so too are the exits of those same companies, especially when they list abroad.

Moving past China, what we can see in the list is a very warm welcome from the markets to recent, large tech IPOs. And all those companies went out before the markets fall apart! That makes the permabear that sleeps on top of my heart happy.

More when the next set of IPOs list. (Just for fun, .)

From The聽:

U.S. wireless carriers Sprint and T-Mobile announced plans to merge in a stock transaction that values the combined company at around $146 billion. The combined company, which will go by the name T-Mobile, also plans to build a nationwide 5G network.

, a provider of logistics software and services for freight shippers, announced that it has raised $100 million in fresh funding from Chinese courier firm SF Express. The new round brings total funding for the five-year-old, San Francisco-based company to more than $300 million.

The Hive raises new fund for AI

, a Silicon Valley venture investor and startup creator, has raised $26.5 million for a new fund that will focus on artificial intelligence-powered applications for the enterprise.

Latina founders challenging the diversity stats

SA国际传媒 News profiles three Latina founders who are scaling up startups in areas ranging from smart mattress covers to legal tech to mobile networking.

Impending IPO DocuSign , filling the market in on its calendar 2017 performance. The information was notably missing from its prior document, which only showed performance through January of last year due to the company’s fiscal calendar.

The new doc, however, is the聽usual treasure trove for financial dorks. It’s got all the guts and bolts you could hope for from a company that has been around as .

But, since it’s Friday and we all need som help, here are the critical notes:

• Revenue Up: DocuSign’s top line grew from $381.5 million to $518.5 million in its most recent fiscal year, expansion of around 36 percent. That seems a solid figure given the scale of DocuSign’s business. It’s not the fastest number we’ve seen, mind, but the results indicate that DocuSign has kept growing its subscription business (93 percent of its revenue in the most recent fiscal year) without, as we’ll shortly see, spending all the money in the world.
• Losses Down:聽The firm’s GAAP net loss fell from $115.4 million in its fiscal year ending January 31, 2017, to $52.3 million in its most recent fiscal year. That’s a solid ramp down, as revenue grew. Here’s evidence that you can expand a SaaS business at scale while losing聽less money over time. (And, just under $30 million of that $52.3 million figure stemmed from share-based compensation costs.)
• Cash Burn Down:聽DocuSign’s free cash flow (operating cash flow + investing cash flow + financing cash flow) rose from -$48.1 million in its fiscal year ending early 2017, to positive $36.1 million in its most recent fiscal year. Operating cash flow grew to nearly $55 million during the same period, up from -$4.8 million the year before.
• Recur This: Here’s a kinda weird one. DocuSign’s dollar-based net retention rate (you can read its definition on if you want to vet its strictness) of 115 percent was flat from the year prior — again. Indeed, for every fiscal year that we have on record, DocuSign put up a 115 percent figure for this metric.

So, there you go. That’s the highest possible level. We’ll have some more notes when it prices. In the meantime, stay out of the rain!

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From The聽:

Global VC dealmaking surges in Q1

• Global venture capital deal and dollar volume in the first quarter of the year eclipsed previous highs, setting fresh quarterly records for post-Dot Com Bubble startup investment. SA国际传媒 projects nearly $77 billion worth of venture deals were completed last quarter, more than double levels from the same period last year, led by a jump in late stage investment.

• Crypto exchange聽聽announced that it is launching a venture capital arm, Coinbase Ventures, that will invest in currency and fintech startups. In other crypto news, another exchange聽, still recovering from a $400 million hack,聽聽to Tokyo-based online brokerage Monex Group.

• Grocery delivery unicorn聽聽is closing on $150 million in new funding from existing investors. It鈥檚 an extension of the company鈥檚 Series E round, which now totals $350 million at a $4.35 billion post-money valuation.

The scooters are taking over

• Scooter sharing companies are scaling up in a big way. The most prominent is聽, which made headlines this month after scoring a $100 million Series B. But a number of other startups across the globe are also navigating the space.