The Exchange announced that it has acquired Form Swift. According to the deal, which closed yesterday, Dropbox will pay $95 million in cash for the San Francisco-based startup, which will soon join the Dropbox team.
According to the press release, Dropbox FormSwift will strengthen existing document storage, signing and sharing capabilities Dropbox Sign, Dropbox Forms and DocSend, bringing Dropbox closer to its goal of building end-to-end “consensus workflow capabilities.” “
“At Dropbox, we’re building tools to help our customers succeed by modernizing manual workflows and digitizing tasks,” Chetan Dandekar, Dropbox’s document workflow team, said in a statement. “With a customer base of small businesses and freelancers alike, and with the most commonly used forms and agreement templates, Forms Swift is a strong addition to our document workflows product suite and we strongly believe it will help us bring more value to our customers,” he said.
FormSwift was founded in 2012 by David Baker and Satvik Tantri with the goal of reducing the time businesses spend filling out commonly used forms. The platform allows corporate customers to use pre-built templates to design forms such as boarding passes, lease agreements and NDAs, populate documents with editing tools or create a variety of custom fields for reusable, shareable and fillable forms.
Screenshot showing the FormSwift interface. Image Credits: Form Swift
Forms says Swift — which apparently took no outside funding before its acquisition — has helped create more than 10 million documents for small business owners and contractors to date.
“Over the past decade, Forms Swift has become a leading tool for people to easily create, edit, sign and collaborate on documents and workflows in the cloud, eliminating unnecessary printing, faxing and snail mail,” Tantri said in a statement. “By partnering with Dropbox, we can better leverage our capabilities to make work easier for many small business and freelance customers.”
Dropbox’s purchase of FormSwift comes after the storage giant snapped up the assets of Boxcryptor, a startup that protects the company’s data across multiple cloud services, earlier this year. Both are part of an ongoing small-cap acquisition strategy that looks to improve Dropbox’s core services rather than better position them against rivals in the highly competitive cloud storage space.
To date, Dropbox has made 28 acquisitions, according to Crunchbase data, the largest of which was the purchase of HelloSign in 2019 for a reported $230 million. In addition to enhancing its existing product offerings, the acquisitions also boosted new Dropbox services, such as Dropbox Shop, which launched earlier this year with tools that allow creators to sell digital content directly to customers.
Dobox, which will report its Q4 earnings in the next few weeks, beat analysts’ estimates of slow but steady growth in the last fiscal quarter, expanding its payment user base to 17.55 million (compared to 16.49 million in Q3 2021). Revenue rose 7 percent year over year to $591 million, compared to $75.6 million in the third quarter of 2021.
