Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Overview
DocuSign offers products that address agreement workflows and digital transformation as part of its agreement management platform, enabling agreements to be signed electronically on a wide variety of devices, from virtually anywhere in the world, securely. DocuSign’s core product offerings, including the world’s leading electronic signature product , allow organizations to do business faster with less risk and at a lower cost, while providing a better experience for customers. DocuSign also offers contract lifecycle management software that automates pre- and post-signature workflows. This includes automatically generating an agreement from data in other systems, supporting negotiation workflows, verifying identities, enabling remote online notarization, collecting payment after signatures, and using artificial intelligence (“AI”) to analyze a collection of agreements for risks and opportunities.
At the core of every business is a series of agreements and every agreement involves a workflow that guides how we create, commit, and manage agreements. However, traditional agreement processes are slow, expensive and error-prone as they involve many manual steps, disconnected systems, and paper signing. Our value proposition is simple to understand: eliminate the paper-based processes, automate agreement workflows, and connect to the applications and systems where work gets done. DocuSign has over 900 active partner integrations, so businesses can easily integrate mission-critical business processes with agreement workflows. This allows organizations to reduce turnaround times and costs, largely eliminate errors, and deliver a streamlined customer experience.
As of January 31, 2024, over 1.5 million customers and more than a billion users in over 180 countries use our products and solutions to accelerate and simplify the process of doing business.
We offer subscriptions to our products, which include editions with varying functionality for different customers’ needs, as well as products and features specific to particular geographies or industries. We also focus on customer adoption, success and expansion. This helps us deliver continued value and creates opportunities for increased usage.
Our customer base is broad and diverse ranging from the largest global enterprises to very small businesses (“VSBs”) and nonprofits, across virtually all industries globally. The world’s leading brands trust DocuSign, including global leaders in energy, industrials, consumer goods, and multiple federal and state government agencies. Within a given organization, our technology is adopted across many business functions and for many use cases including: generating contracts for sales, signing employment offers for human resources, and analyzing commercial agreements for legal, among many others. The global reach and broad applicability of eSignature across business functions, combined with our offering of end-to-end contract lifecycle management applications represents an addressable market of approximately $50 billion, according to our estimates.
To capitalize on this opportunity, our sales and marketing strategy focuses on attracting new businesses, as well as expanding our use cases within existing customers. We rely on our direct sales force and partnerships to sell to enterprises and commercial businesses. We also rely on a digital self-service channel to attract new customers in a more cost-effective manner, in particular those customers in segments or markets that may not be currently or easily serviced by our direct sales or partner efforts. As a result of our product-led-growth initiatives, we expect the portion of business that comes from our digital self-service channel to continue to increase.
The Benefits of Using DocuSign
DocuSign leverages our core strength in eSignature to deliver easier, smarter and more trusted agreements. We help organizations connect and automate agreement workflows with our industry leading product offerings that span the entire agreement lifecycle to enhance the customer experience while enabling the digital transformation of agreements.
In addition to what we do, we believe we are differentiated by how we do it:
• Simple to use. A key reason for our customer loyalty is our products’ ease of use. Our eSignature product allows users to send and sign an agreement from practically anywhere to any device, delivering greater efficiency and faster time to value for our customers. We are widely known for our ease of use and customer satisfaction. For example, as of January 2024, our eSignature app had more than 700,000 ratings with an average score of 4.9 out of 5 stars on Apple's App Store.
• Developer-friendly. Our extensive application programming interfaces (“APIs”) enable our products to be quickly embedded into or connected with an organization’s own apps, systems and processes. Our platform has more than
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900 active partner integrations with business systems where work gets done. In the case of eSignature, this has led to the majority of transactions being driven through our APIs today. By integrating with the other systems our customers use to do business—as opposed to simply being a standalone app—we promote greater usage and engagement with our products.
• Vertical offerings. We offer enhanced solutions tailored to particular industries, such as financial services, government, life sciences, and real estate. In some cases, these may be variants of a product like eSignature, such as our eSignature Life Sciences Modules for assisting with compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. In other cases, it may be a distinct product for an industry, such as Rooms for Real Estate, which includes task management, templates, and workflow for real estate transactions. Finally, it may include a combination of additional capabilities and authorizations such as FedRAMP Moderate, which enables us to support various use cases within federal government agencies.
• Globally adopted. Our expertise in electronic signature and other agreement technologies is truly global. This is key, given that different regions have different laws, standards and cultural norms. We assist multiple parties in different jurisdictions to complete agreements and other documents in a legally valid manner. For example, in Europe, we have offerings tailored for the European Union’s (“EU”) electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (“eIDAS”) regulations, as well as for verifying European eIDs.
• Highly auditable. With eSignature, every signed document is backed by a unique, auditable Certificate of Completion, automatically capturing key signing details to help authenticate the document. It includes party names, email addresses, public IP addresses, and a time-stamped record of individuals’ interactions with the document. This level of evidence and auditability exceeds what is possible with traditional ink-on-paper signatures.
• Stringent security standards. We seek to meet the industry’s most rigorous security certification standards and use the strongest data encryption technologies that are commercially available. Our systems and processes for data protection, transmission and secure storage are certified for the globally recognized security standard, ISO 27001, among many other key privacy and security certifications.
• Scaled infrastructure. Our main infrastructure is powered by near real-time data synchronization across a ring of four geo-dispersed data centers in the United States (“U.S.”), and a similar ring of data centers in the EU. This infrastructure has enabled us to deliver over 99.9% availability to our eSignature customers and users worldwide over the past 12 months.
We believe customers benefit from working with us in many ways, including:
• Doing business faster. By replacing manual, paper-driven processes with automated digital workflows, DocuSign can substantially reduce the time and labor necessary to complete agreements. In fiscal 2024, 76% of all transactions using eSignature were completed in less than 24 hours and 41% within 15 minutes. Our eSignature product also saves customers time by allowing users to review and sign agreements quickly from mobile devices. Our other products also contribute to faster turnaround times, such as less time spent creating new agreements or less time spent finding completed agreements. By streamlining workflows, DocuSign enables businesses to save valuable time and resources, resulting in increased productivity and cost savings.
• Better customer and employee experience. Organizations that use DocuSign services internally and externally can deliver a simpler, more streamlined experience for their own customers and employees. For example, eSignature replaces the hassle and costs of faxing, printing, scanning, emailing, and other manual activities with a few clicks or taps—which can be done from practically anywhere, at any time. Our Contract Lifecycle Management (“CLM”) software consolidates and automates every step of the agreement process from generation through negotiation, signature, ongoing management and storage.
• Reduced risk. Organizations that rely on manual, paper-based agreement processes may be prone to error and difficult to audit. Using DocuSign, organizations can centralize, standardize, and automate agreement workflows—so employees have an easy way to use approved processes and templates, with audit trails generated automatically. Also, AI technologies can help employees identify risks within large sets of existing agreements that would otherwise be impractical for manual review. Finally, fewer manual interactions during an agreement’s lifecycle means fewer opportunities for mishandling or improper access.
• Minimized environmental impact. Environmental sustainability has been an important part of the DocuSign story since its inception. eSignature not only reduces the use of paper, but also significant amounts of the waste, water, carbon, and wood required to make that paper. We believe that DocuSign has an important role in creating a low-carbon, sustainable future and our products can help our customers incorporate sustainability into their business operations. DocuSign solutions have helped our customers digitize agreement processes, saving the equivalent of 93 billion sheets of paper, 9 billion gallons of water, 7 billion pounds of carbon-dioxide and 545 million pounds of waste, as of January 31, 2024.
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Our Growth Strategy
We intend to drive the growth of our business by executing on the following strategies:
• Invest in innovation and expansion of our products. We expect to continue investing in research and development to enhance our offerings, as well as to develop new solutions that further augment DocuSign’s product offerings. In addition, we expect to continue to use partnerships to offer new integrations and, in some cases, products for resale. We leverage sophisticated AI models for contract analysis and automation of some agreement workflows and plan to continue investing into generative AI for data and pattern recognition to further increase productivity and reduce friction for our customers. Finally, we have acquired and may continue to acquire additional capabilities and make investments in key technologies.
• Expand our install base through new use cases and adoption of additional products, features and functionality. A company’s first exposure to DocuSign is often through the use of eSignature in accelerating the execution of agreements. Our strategy aims to expand beyond the initial eSignature use case to facilitate digital transformation across agreement workflows. At every step of this process, we also see an opportunity to expand across the organization—for example, going from sales into services, human resources, finance, and other functions—thereby increasing the overall number of agreement workflows that are automated. Our largest and most advanced customers have hundreds of use cases deployed, but the vast majority of our customers have only deployed a few use cases. Thus, we believe there is strong potential to expand within our existing customer base.
• Drive new eSignature and CLM customer acquisition. We offer the world’s leading electronic signature product and CLM software. Our portfolio of products have successfully streamlined the agreement process for our customers and have automated many of the workflows before and after the signature. We believe there is a $50 billion market opportunity for customer expansion for eSignature, CLM, and our other DocuSign products, in both the U.S. and non-U.S. markets.
• Expand self-serve capabilities. We believe all customers can leverage our products and do business in a more automated way. Our self-service digital sales strategy begins with a 30-day free trial to experience our eSignature product. We have created a frictionless digital onboarding experience to allow customers to engage the way they prefer, enabling them to buy and manage their DocuSign relationship in a low-touch way. Our goal is to enable a seamless and world class self-service experience.
• Accelerate international expansion. In the year ended January 31, 2024, we derived 26% of our revenue from customers outside the U.S. We believe there is a substantial opportunity for us to increase our international customer base by leveraging and expanding investments in our technology, direct sales force and strategic partnerships around the world, as well as helping existing U.S.-based customers manage agreements across their international businesses. In fiscal 2024, we made additional investments in two high-potential countries, Germany and Japan, which included localized sales, support, and content. We deploy a digital-first strategy in many emerging markets to more efficiently reach potential customers that may not otherwise be serviced by our direct sales force.
• Strengthen and foster our developer community. With over 400,000 developer sandboxes created to enable product development and testing in isolated environments, and the majority of transactions on eSignature processed via our APIs today, we believe we have a strong developer community. Our easy-to-use and robust APIs allow developers to extend and integrate DocuSign products into their own applications. These developers help expand DocuSign functionality to other systems, thus driving greater usage of our platform and offerings. We intend to continue investing in our APIs and other forms of support to further drive this virtuous cycle of value creation between developers and DocuSign.
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Our Products
DocuSign enables businesses to address each aspect of the agreement process with our product offerings, which are tailored for each step in the agreement lifecycle and, in some cases, for particular market segments, industries or geographic regions. We focus on meeting customer needs by providing them a variety of products and solutions to address their needs.
Some key products include:
• eSignature , our anchor product, enables sending and signing of agreements on a wide variety of devices, from virtually anywhere in the world, securely. We offer multiple editions and add-ons that can be combined to fit the needs of different organizational sizes, industries and regions.
• CLM orchestrates workflows across the entire agreement process. It provides organizations the flexibility to automate complex processes for generating, negotiating, and storing agreements, as well as the ability to leverage AI-powered contract analytics to discover risks and opportunities hidden within agreements. We offer multiple editions of CLM, each tailored to meet the needs of customers with different organizational sizes and contracting complexity.
• Gen for Salesforce allows sales representatives to automatically generate polished, customizable agreements with a few clicks from within Salesforce, and is optimized for small to mid-sized businesses who value a simplified solution that is easy to install and maintain.
• Document Generation streamlines the process of generating new, custom agreements. It allows customers to build and maintain templates to generate custom, accurate and professional-looking agreements quickly by using a centralized template hub, an intuitive template builder, and dynamic merge fields and tables.
• Identify is a family of enhanced signer-identification options, such as for checking government-issued IDs.
• Standards-Based Signatures (“SBS”) support electronic signatures that utilize digital certificates, including those specified in the EU’s eIDAS regulations for advanced and qualified electronic signatures (also known as digital signatures).
• Monitor uses advanced analytics to track DocuSign eSignature web, mobile and API account activity across the customer’s organization to provide near real-time visibility and strengthen security.
• Notary combines our eSignature and ID verification tools to enable notaries public to conduct remote online notarization (“RON”) transactions. Notary is Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization Certified for RON transactions.
• Web Forms accelerate contract drafting time by providing DocuSign customers with interactive web forms to quickly draft agreements using pre-populated data from completed forms or external systems via APIs.
Our industry-specific DocuSign offerings include:
• Real Estate: Rooms for Real Estate provides a way for real estate brokers, agents and customers to manage the entire real estate transaction digitally. It enables the creation and editing of documents; custom approval processes and workflows for sharing and signing those documents; integration with zipForm and other providers to simplify the completion of paperless forms; and an API to ensure easy connection with Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) systems, accounting software and other real estate related systems.
• U.S. Federal, State and Local Government customers: For federal civilian agency customers, DocuSign maintains a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (“FedRAMP”) Impact Level Moderate environment for eSignature and CLM commercial products, running within dedicated data centers and system boundaries that offer heightened security in the storage, transmission and encryption of data. For U.S. Department of Defense (“DoD”) customers, DocuSign maintains an Impact Level-4 authorization for eSignature and CLM, having demonstrated our ability to meet DoD’s rigorous security requirements for storing and handling controlled unclassified information.
• Health and Life Sciences: Modules for 21 CFR Part 11 are add-ons for eSignature that support compliance with the electronic signature practices established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 21 CFR Part 11 regulations.
Different pricing structures apply to different products. For example, we price our eSignature subscriptions based on the functionality required by our customers and the quantity of Envelopes provisioned. Similar to how physical agreements were mailed for signature in paper envelopes historically, we refer to an Envelope as a digital container used to send one or more documents for signature or approval to one or more recipients. Our customers have the flexibility to put a large number of documents in an Envelope. For a number of use cases, such as buying a home, multiple Envelopes could be used.
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Our Technology, Infrastructure and Operations
Our technology and product efforts are focused on improving and enhancing the features, functionality, performance, availability and security of our product offerings. We focus on innovation in global security and privacy management, high availability, enterprise-class manageability, extensible identity proofing, digital transaction processing and integration into companies' systems and workflows. This infrastructure supports over one billion people and 1.5 million customers, including some of the world’s largest companies, and underpins our product offerings.
Our operations are based on stringent global industry security standards and we maintain compliance with ISO27K, PCI, and SSAE 18 standards. For example, our eSignature and CLM products are FedRAMP-authorized, which means they operate in an environment that meets 325 National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) Special Publication 800-53 (“NIST 800-53) security and privacy controls. In addition, we offer a range of options for authenticating users and proving their identities and have a robust digital transaction processing platform that captures signatures and tags. DocuSign is a Trust Service Provider (“TSP”) in the EU. As a TSP, DocuSign France provides qualified electronic signatures, qualified time stamps, advanced electronic signatures, and advanced seals recognized by all EU member states. DocuSign France is listed as a qualified TSP in the Trusted List managed by the French IT Security Agency, ANSSI.
Our flagship eSignature product is designed as an always-on, geographically redundant and distributed cloud solution that runs in SSAE 18 audited data centers in the U.S. and EU. Recognizing that our customers often depend on DocuSign for their day-to-day operations, we have provided best-in-class availability, with over 99.9% eSignature availability to our customers and users over the past 12 months. Our company operates co-location data centers in several locations and we also leverage public cloud infrastructure for an increasing number of services. Companies can also integrate DocuSign into their systems and workflows using one of more than 900 active partner integrations.
Research and Development
Since inception, we have invested in research and development (“R&D”) to innovate our product offerings, including the world’s leading electronic signature solution. Our product and engineering team is responsible for the design, development, testing and certification of our products.
Our Customers
As of January 31, 2024, we had over 1.5 million paying customers globally, serving the needs of some of the largest enterprises and governmental organizations down to sole proprietors and individual end users. No single customer accounted for more than 10% of our revenues in fiscal 2024.
Sales, Marketing and Customer Success
Our sales and marketing teams are focused on driving adoption and expanded use of DocuSign’s products by customers and prospects across the globe. We benefit greatly from our strong brand recognition given our association with positive signing moments in people’s lives—such as accepting a job or buying a house—which can influence the adoption of our solutions at their companies. Given that our offerings are designed to solve the needs of organizations of all sizes and across all industries and geographies, we sell to customer bases ranging from global enterprises to sole proprietors. Our go-to-market strategy leverages our direct sales force, digital motions, and partnerships to sell to enterprises and commercial businesses, and our digital self-service channel to sell primarily to VSBs, which is the most cost-effective way to reach our smallest customers. We also employ tailored go-to-market strategies by industry verticals. We focus on bringing value to every function inside those verticals.
Sales
Our go-to-market model involves a combination of direct sales, partner-assisted sales, and digital self-service purchasing:
Direct Sales: We sell subscriptions primarily through our direct sales force across our field offices around the world. Our account executives and account managers focus on new and existing enterprise and commercial customers. Our direct sales team focuses on companies looking to streamline front office operations (e.g., sales, services or marketing) and back office operations (e.g., human resources, procurement, finance, or legal). By expanding within an organization, we believe we can generate large amounts of incremental revenue through the addition of new users and Envelopes, plan upgrades, expansions, and additional offerings to other functions or business units.
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Partner-assisted Sales :
▪ Global partners : We have partnerships with some of the world’s foremost technology providers including Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow—that help us sell into a far greater number of accounts than we could do alone. These partnerships are multi-dimensional and involve joint investments, technology integrations, co-marketing agreements, membership in partner programs, and go-to-market commitments.
▪ Systems integrators : We have strong partnerships with a number of global and regional systems integrators. These relationships are important given that those firms act as strategic technology advisors to many large customers and prospects. We intend to invest further in collaborating with these partners, especially those that are creating DocuSign specific practices.
▪ Independent Software Vendors (“ISVs”) : We partner with a host of leading ISVs—including our strategic partners above as well as vertical oriented partners to help bring the power of DocuSign to customers around the world.
▪ Distributors and resellers : As part of our evolving go-to-market strategy, we have distribution partnerships with global industry leaders like Ingram Micro enabling us to reach tens of thousands of resellers. We also have partnerships with solution providers such as Deutsche Telekom and others that have expertise in specific vertical and regional markets, enabling us to add further value directly to those markets.
Digital Sales: Through a strong presence that allows us to scale with low acquisition costs to individual users and small businesses around the world, we drive free 30-day trial and self-service solutions directly on our website, in our mobile applications and through use of our product itself. Our digital sales engine provides direct access to account plans with functionality to suit the needs of small businesses, sole proprietors, and individuals.
Marketing
To support the sales team in reaching our broad range of potential customers, our integrated marketing programs address the specific needs of our different market segments. These programs create qualified sales opportunities and raise awareness of our leadership position in the global electronic signature and agreement-technology spaces.
In addition to account-based marketing aimed directly at our high-value customers and industry-specific marketing by our industry vertical teams, we also deploy a range of other marketing strategies and tactics across the globe. These include broader digital demand generation campaigns; corporate communications and analyst relations; first-party events, such as our annual set of roadshows gathering customers, prospects, developers and partners; participation in third-party events, such as Salesforce’s Dreamforce; comprehensive customer evidence and advocacy programs; developer relations programs; cooperative marketing with strategic partners; and a comprehensive webinar series, among many other things. We also believe the ability for prospects to easily try eSignature from our website or when interacting with our product creates awareness that extends beyond the acquisition of new VSB customers.
Customer Success & Customer Support
We believe that our Customer Success and Customer Support efforts are critical to retaining and expanding our customer base.
Customer Success helps onboard customers by designing, integrating, training, and deploying solutions that meet their needs. Our solutions engineers and technical experts can also design tailored solutions to help customers improve workflow and automate business processes. Once customers are onboarded, Customer Success continues to guide them through their DocuSign journeys using motions such as health checks, account planning and renewal management.
Customer Support also plays an important role in helping our customers by being available via telephone, email or the web to help answer general and technical questions.
Both Customer Success and Customer Support offer in-depth expertise, proven best practices, and repeatable delivery methodologies designed to enhance our customers’ overall DocuSign experience and ensure they achieve successful outcomes using our products.
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Human Capital Management
At DocuSign, we foster an inclusive culture that celebrates and harnesses the strength of diversity, recognizing that every individual brings unique perspectives and experiences to the table. Our values are reflected in six pillars:
• Trust: We are honest, ethical, and transparent with each other, our customers, and our partners. We operate with integrity, empathy, and respect;
• Customer Focus: We are customer-centric, everything we do begins and ends with creating seamless experiences that drive customer value;
• Simplicity: We aspire to delight our customers and eliminate complexity. We are easy to work with and eliminate friction;
• Innovation: We foster a culture of creativity, experimentation, and continuous improvement as we pioneer the way the world agrees;
• Unity: We are inclusive and share common values. We debate and commit to executing decisions with agility and speed, working together in service of our shared mission;
• Sustainability: We use technology and drive awareness that can make the world healthier and more sustainable.
In addition, our mission is to redefine how the world comes together and agrees. We are committed to delivering against these values for our employees, customers and the communities in which we live and work. We have several initiatives and strategies in place that reflect this commitment to our core values and to our employees.
We are a global organization with an increasingly international footprint. As we continue to grow in new markets, we anticipate continuing to recruit in new geographies. As of January 31, 2024, we had 6,840 employees, of which approximately 52% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 30% in engineering, product development and customer operations, and 18% in general and administrative. We had approximately 67% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations. None of our employees is represented by a labor union with respect to his or her employment with us. We have not experienced any work stoppages. We consider our relations with our employees to be positive, and we measure employee satisfaction through bi-annual engagement surveys.
Talent and Career Development
We empower our people to constantly learn, develop, and contribute to their full potential. We value and embrace ideas, encouraging innovation and creativity at every level, while staying true to our mission and core values to drive positive change in everything we do. We offer a number of resources to eligible employees to help engage and develop our employees including career development coursework, frameworks and education assistance.
DocuSign is recognized as a company where employees can develop their careers. During fiscal 2024, we were recognized as one of Newsweek’s Greatest Workplaces for Women in America 2023, as well as one of the Most Trustworthy Companies in America 2023.
Compensation and Benefits Programs
Our compensation programs are designed to recruit, reward and retain talented individuals who possess the skills necessary to support our business, contribute to our strategic goals and create long-term value for our stockholders. We aim to provide employees with competitive compensation packages that include base salary, bonus or commission plan and equity awards tied to the value of our stock. We also provide a range of health, savings, retirement, time-off and wellness benefits for our employees, which vary based on local regulations and norms.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
We believe that having diverse teams working in an inclusive environment will help us achieve better business results — across product innovation, customer experience and employee success.
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The key pillars to our diversity, equity and inclusion (“DEI”) strategy include:
• Accountability: Senior leader accountability and engagement with DEI is key to operationalizing the work globally. This is driven through the existence of DEI plans for every business function and owned by each member of the Executive Leadership Team.
• Transparency: We publish employee diversity information by gender and race/ethnicity on our website to promote accountability and underscore our commitment to diversity. In September 2023, we launched our first internal DEI and Experience report, which highlighted our three-pronged approach to DEI (A.I.M. - Act, Include, Mobilize), workforce and workplace milestones towards progress-representation and workplace inclusion, areas of continued focus, review of external partnerships and internal programs, spotlight our Employee Resource Groups (“ERGs”) and share what is next in our journey towards an inclusive and diverse DocuSign that fosters equitable experiences for all.
• Pipeline : We seek to increase the diversity of individual candidates applying to help us develop our products and our business.
• Candidate Experience : We have developed specialized interview training in which employees learn how to interrupt bias and understand the importance of building diverse candidate slates and interviewer panels.
• Education : Through management training, speaker series, and online learning, we are actively raising awareness, cultivating an inclusive culture, and building practical skills for mitigating bias.
• Community : DocuSign’s ERGs serve as culture carriers and provide employees a way for colleagues to connect, network and build cross team collaboration. Through our ERG program, employees are able to participate in external recruitment events to diversify our pipeline, personal and professional learning and development and give back to the community through volunteering, donation drives and awareness campaigns.
Engagement with our Communities
DocuSign is dedicated to corporate responsibility and putting our values into action. We believe that this engagement with our communities is an important aspect of our company culture and brings long-term value to our stockholders, while making the world a better place. With DocuSign IMPACT, we are committed to harnessing the power of DocuSign's people, products, and profits to make a difference in the global communities where our employees and customers live and work. In 2018, we committed to donating at least $30 million in cash or stock to DocuSign IMPACT over the next 10 years. In addition, the use of our products is associated with decreased paper use for our customers and we specifically donate to forest-protection and other environmental impact causes. Since we launched DocuSign for Forests in 2019, we have donated over $2.8 million to date to organizations doing critical work to preserve the world’s forests.
We believe in promoting a culture of giving back and community support throughout our organization. As a company, we ensure that thousands of charitable organizations have the opportunity to use our products for free or at a discount every year. We also encourage our employees to take action in their own communities by volunteering and are proud to support their efforts by providing up to 24 hours of paid time off a year for volunteering. Our employees have volunteered thousands of hours collectively, including at organizations promoting healthier forests, echoing our company-wide commitment to environmental savings. Additionally, we match funds given by our employees to qualifying non-profits.
Our Competition
Our primary global competitor for eSignature is currently Adobe, which offers an electronic signature solution known as Adobe Acrobat Sign as well as other global software companies that have or may elect to include an electronic signature capability in their products. We also face competition from a select number of vendors that focus on specific industries, geographies, or product areas such as contract lifecycle management and advanced contract analytics.
We believe the principal factors that drive competition between vendors in the future will include:
• breadth and depth of innovative product functionality (including proprietary product differentiators);
• breadth and depth of integrations with the applications and systems customers already use;
• availability and reliability;
• security;
• ease of use and deployment;
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• brand awareness and reputation;
• unit costs and total cost of ownership;
• level of customer satisfaction; and
• ability to address legal, regulatory, and cultural matters associated with e-signature across jurisdictions.
We believe that we generally compete favorably on the basis of the factors listed above.
Intellectual Property
We own and develop significant intellectual property (“IP”) and related IP rights around the world that support our products, services, R&D, and other activities and assets. Our IP portfolio includes patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, and other rights. We actively seek to protect our global IP rights and to deter unauthorized use of our IP and other assets. We have obtained patents in the U.S. and other countries. As we expand our product offerings into new areas, we also seek to extend our patent coverage to such products. In addition to developing patents based on our own R&D efforts, we may purchase or license patents from third parties.
The software that we embed within our products, as well as software that we distribute, also is entitled to copyright and other IP protection. We also protect details about our processes, products, and strategies as trade secrets, keeping confidential the information that we believe provides us with a competitive advantage.
In addition, we seek to protect our IP rights by requiring our employees, independent contractors, and business partners involved in development of IP on our behalf to enter into agreements acknowledging that all works or other IP generated or conceived by them on our behalf are our property, and assigning to us any rights, including IP rights, that they may claim or otherwise have in those works or property, to the extent allowable under applicable law.
Because of the fast pace of innovation and product development, our products may become obsolete before the patents related to them expire, and in some cases may become obsolete before the patents are granted. Efforts to protect our IP can be difficult, particularly in countries that provide less protection to IP rights and in the absence of harmonized international IP standards. Competitors and others may already have IP rights covering similar products. There is no assurance that we will be able to obtain IP rights covering our own products, or that we will be able to obtain IP licenses from other companies on favorable terms or at all. For a discussion of IP-related risks, see "Risk Factors".
Corporate Information
We were incorporated as DocuSign, Inc. in Washington in April 2003. We merged with and into DocuSign, Inc., a Delaware corporation, in March 2015. Our website address is www.DocuSign.com. The information contained in, or accessible through, our website or any other websites referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are not incorporated into this filing. Further, our references to website addresses are only as inactive textual references.
“DocuSign,” the DocuSign logo, and other trademarks or service marks of DocuSign, Inc. appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of DocuSign, Inc. This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains additional trade names, trademarks and service marks of others, which are the property of their respective owners. Solely for convenience, trademarks and trade names referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K may appear without the ® or ™ symbols.
Available Information
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act are filed with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed or furnished by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at investor.docusign.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC, when such reports are available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. We use our website, including our investor relations website at investor.docusign.com, as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.
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