Dropbox buys form management platform FormSwift for $95M in cash

Dropbox today announced that it’s acquired FormSwift, a cloud-based platform designed to help businesses build, edit, approve, share and print custom personalized documents. Under the terms of the agreement, which closed yesterday, Dropbox will pay $95 million in cash for the San Francisco-based startup, which will soon join the Dropbox team.

In a press release, Dropbox says that FormSwift will bolster the former’s existing document storage, signing and sharing capabilities, including Dropbox Sign, Dropbox Forms and DocSend, bringing Dropbox closer to its goal of building an end-to-end “agreement workflow capability.”

“At Dropbox, we’re building tools to help our customers succeed in today’s virtual-first world by modernizing manual workflows and digitizing tasks,” VP and GM of Dropbox’s document workflows group Chetan Dandekar said in a statement. “With a similar customer base of small businesses and freelancers, and a library of commonly used forms and agreement templates, we firmly believe that FormSwift is a strong addition to our document workflows product suite, and will help us bring even more value to our customers.”

FormSwift was co-founded by David Becker and Sathvik Tantry in 2012 with the goal of reducing the amount of time businesses spend filling out commonly used forms. The platform allows corporate customers to use prebuilt templates to design forms like onboarding waivers, rental agreements and NDAs, fill up documents through editing tools or create reusable, shareable and completable forms by adding various custom fields.

FormSwift — which appears to have taken on no outside funding prior to the acquisition — claims that it’s helped to create more than 10 million documents to date for small-business owners and contractors.

“Over the last decade, FormSwift has become a leading provider of tools to help people easily create, edit, sign and collaborate on documents and workflows in the cloud, eliminating unnecessary printing, faxing, and snail mail,” Tantry said in a statement. “By joining forces with Dropbox, we can better scale our capabilities to make work easier for a larger number of small businesses and freelance customers.”

Dropbox’s purchase of FormSwift comes after the storage giant snatched up Boxcryptor assets, a startup that protects companies’ data across numerous cloud services, earlier this year. Both are a part of a continued small acquisition strategy that looks to enhance rather than cannibalize Dropbox’s core services to better position them against rivals in the ultra-competitive cloud storage space.

So far, Dropbox has made 28 such acquisitions, according to Crunchbase data, the largest being the buyout of HelloSign in 2019 at a reported $230 million. In addition to enhancing its existing product offerings, the purchases have fueled the launch of new Dropbox services like Dropbox Shop, which launched earlier this year with tools that let creators sell digital content directly to their customers.

Dropbox, which will announce its Q4 earnings in the next few weeks, beat analysts’ estimates last fiscal quarter after a year of slow but steady growth, expanding its paying user base to 17.55 million (versus 16.49 million in Q3 2021). Revenues increased 7% annually to $591 million while net profit was $83.2 million, up from $75.6 million in the third quarter of 2021.