The 2017 CRM Market Rising Stars: PandaDoc

Cofounded in 2013 by CEO Mikita Mikado and chief technology officer Serge Barysiuk, document automation software provider PandaDoc helps speed up the pesky late stages of the buying cycle, when customers are asked for signatures and payments. 

“The vision we have at PandaDoc is to take the process of closing anything substantial—that requires paperwork like contracts, quotes, and proposals—and make it digital,” Mikado says. 

The San Francisco–based company has taken steps to democratize the world of commerce for B2B firms and extend CRM tools to help smooth out interactions with customers. 

In September, the company launched the Add-on Store, where companies can buy extensions for customizing transactional documents; the vendor’s document creation, analytics, e-signature, and configure-price-quote (CPQ) products are also available. The store is part of what Mikado calls “a strategic move towards becoming a developer ecosystem.”

PandaDoc was already integrated with industry heavyweights Salesforce.com and Zendesk, and it announced additional partnerships and compatibility with Insightly, Oracle Sales Cloud, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Zoho, bpm’online, and HubSpot, helping it solidify its market presence. 

PandaDoc raised $15 million in a Series B funding round that counted HubSpot and Microsoft as participants. This was the first investment HubSpot ever made, Mikado points out. 

“This past quarter, we launched the ability to transact payments through PandaDoc,” Mikado says, pointing to an extended partnership with Stripe that allows users to process credit card payments and Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments within their PandaDoc documents. So far, more than 2.5 billion transactions have been closed on that platform.

Due in part to these developments, the company now has more than 7,000 customers, about 3,000 more than a year ago. “I consider that to be really strong growth, considering we’ve also moved upmarket quite a bit,” Mikado says. The company has been largely focused on a midsize clientele but is attracting quite a few larger firms and plans to continue “slowly moving further upmarket,” Mikado says.