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Enterprise Backed Document Workflow Provider AirSlate acquires a private PDF editor and document signing platform DocHub in a deal announced today. The financial terms of the deal are not being made public.
The acquisition comes just over a month after AirSlate raised $51.5 million in a Series C financing round on June 16. The company’s technology platform offers a suite of no-code document workflows that take advantage of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to help improve productivity.
DocHub provides an online platform integrated with Google Workspace that allows organizations to edit and sign PDF documents.
“DocHub actually fits in really well with our other automation offerings like no-code RPA,” Borya Shakhnovich, AirSlate co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat. “DocHub is the most widely used PDF and e-signature editing solution on the Google Workspace marketplace, and our customers will be able to take advantage of that capability once the integration is complete.”
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The Challenges and Opportunities of Workflow Automation
The market opportunities for workflow automation and e-signature tools are competitive.
One of the major vendors in the space is Adobe with its Adobe Sign capabilities, as well as DocuSign, which has been growing its business lately, including investments in AI software.
Shakhnovich noted that he definitely sees DocuSign in competitive deals, although he doesn’t see Adobe nearly as often. AirSlate’s focus is more on the mid-market, helping companies with document workflow digital transformation efforts, while still supporting an organization’s existing processes.
While it may seem outdated to some, there are many organizations that still rely on fax technology for data transfer. To that end, AirSlate’s platform has existing integrations with fax providers, both for inbound and outbound faxes.
“We believe that business process automation and document workflow automation really succeed when the platform is flexible enough to accommodate the customers and the way they run their businesses,” said Shakhnovich. “Whether they want to fax those things or send them on a carrier pigeon.”
While Shakhnovich admitted that carrier pigeon delivery is somewhat unlikely, he noted that AirSlate does have integrations with physical mail delivery services for those who print messages and then actually send them.
The intersection of AI and document workflow automation
E-signature technology, which replaces the need for people to use pen and paper to sign a document, is not new. Shakhnovich estimates that electronic signatures have been available to businesses for at least 14 years.
The first-generation electronic signature technology was intended to familiarize users with signing documents online, but that’s not where AirSlate is today, or where it’s going with DocHub.
“I think where the industry is going is a lot more toward automation — and really data processing on top of documents — and that’s something we’ve focused on,” Shakhnovich said.
What AirSlate offers is the ability to automate the document workflow process instead of just filling out and signing a document. Shakhnovich said AirSlate, in addition to DocHub and its integrations into the Google Workspace, can be supported with the company’s no-code RPA bots. He explained that the RPA bots enable process automation to get the data from documents into other systems as part of a workflow process.
The AI-powered bots can also help an organization automate the process of data entry across systems as the document workflow progresses. AI can help make approval decisions, based on criteria recommended by the AI bot. Shakhnovich added that AI can also be used to identify areas that could be problematic in a document, such as incomplete information or possible security breaches.
“We’re really excited about AI and machine learning and the bots we can create,” he said. “Some things that are examples of using AI are identification of specific types of documents and automatic tagging of those documents, based on the information in the document.”
Looking ahead, Shakhnovich said AirSlate will continue to build out its platform, with new APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable greater extensibility and integration with other enterprise application platforms.
“We really want to be the data pipe within the company that allows people to identify the data needed to communicate with the customers, and then do all the information about that data before passing it on to a cloud storage system or customer relationship management system,” he said.
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