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A major issue of digital transformation, the dematerialization of work tools has taken on a new dimension thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. With confinements that made travel impossible for several weeks, companies had no choice but to adapt in the blink of an eye to the constraints caused by the health crisis. The situation has therefore greatly benefited start-ups offering digital tools, such as Yousign, a young French company specializing in electronic signatures.
Founded in 2013 by Luc Pallavidino and Antoine Louiset, the company had an exceptional year in 2020, marked by vertiginous growth of 200%. In the midst of a pandemic, Yousign saw its number of customers increase from 1,500 to 6,500 in just 18 months. “Overnight, we saw a meteoric rise in requests. It was pretty crazy to experience. Of all the companies that forced their way to e-signing, none went back to paper”notes Luc Pallavidino, co-founder and co-CEO of Yousign. “Switching to digital tools, such as the electronic signature, makes it possible to remove and automate all the tasks that have no added value”he adds to justify the enthusiasm around dematerialization solutions.
An acquisition to begin its diversification
In its business segment, the tricolor start-up, which today claims more than 13,000 customers, has a hard time dealing with the heavyweights of the sector, such as the American DocuSign, which holds 40% of the French market, and the French Docaposte (30%), digital subsidiary of La Poste which claims to have recorded 33 million electronic signatures in 2021. However, Yousign believes that it has the right approach to pull out of the game. “All the competition goes back to the big accounts, but they don’t know how to manage VSEs and SMEs well. However, 98% of companies in France and Europe are small businesses”notes Luc Pallavidino.
To better meet the needs of this type of company, Yousign acquired Canyon at the start of the year. Born in 2020 in the bosom of the start-up studio eFounders, renowned for taking off SaaS solutions intended to facilitate the daily life of companies, this start-up has developed software dedicated to the automation of contract management. For Yousign, this diversification was the logical step after having made its mark with the electronic signature. “Now our goal is to ensure the management of the contractual cycle”says Luc Pallavidino.
In this sense, the company, which also partnered with eFounders in 2019, does not rule out making other acquisitions to expand its scope a little more. To achieve this, it will be able to draw on the 30 million euros raised on the occasion of the series A completed in June 2021. This financing aims to feed its ambitions on the European market, where the company is present in France, in Germany and Italy. While the cap of 50,000 European SMEs equipped by 2024 was mentioned for a time, Yousign no longer sets a limit. Above all, it hopes to reach profitability at the end of 2023, ten years after its creation.