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DocuSign Lands $233 Million Investment at $3 Billion Valuation

Brookside Capital leads the round joined by Generation Investment Management and ClearBridge Investments.

iStock

DocuSign, the digital signature software company, has raised a $233 million Series F investment. According to sources familiar with the terms of the deal, it values the San Francisco-based firm at $3 billion post-money.

The software, among other things, replaces a written signature on documents that are created electronically. DocuSign doesn’t have the sexiest of premises, but it’s useful for some businesses transitioning analog practices to a digital world.

Hedge fund Brookside Capital led the round, joined by the private equity firms Generation Investment Management and ClearBridge Investments. Other investors who participated in the round include Iconiq Capital, Wasatch Advisors, Wellington Management and Sands Capital Ventures.

The investment brings DocuSign’s total capital raised to north of $440 million. It’s also taken investments from a who’s who of strategic funds including Google Ventures, SAP Ventures, VISA, Salesforce, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., Telstra and Comcast.

The valuation is slightly less than double the $1.6 billion at which DocuSign took its last round, an $85 million Series E, early last year.

It comes on the heels of a spate of major funding rounds for private tech companies. The list of private unicorns — the term used for companies valued at over a billion dollars — grows longer by the day with new entrants like Warby Parker and Twilio.

Other unicorns, like Chinese drone company DJI, business software company Domo, enterprise chatting application Slack and DocuSign itself have almost or more than doubled their valuations with recent investments. All the activity brings the total valuation of so-called private unicorns to $371 billion internationally according to data from startup analytics firm CB Insights.

DocuSign has joined the coveted unicorn club in part because of its ubiquity. It’s valued highly because it’s in use at more than 100,000 companies in industries as varied as health care, pharmaceuticals, mortgage lending, banking and insurance.

The company said it has been used by more than 50 million people around the world. It is also partners with companies like Microsoft, SAP and NetSuite, which support its technology within their applications and resell DocuSign to their customers.

CEO Keith Krach said in an interview that he hopes to take the company public eventually but has no immediate plans to do so. “We would view an IPO as a financing event, and so it’s fair to say we’d like to do it someday, but I wouldn’t care to say when.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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