An under-the-radar, bootstrapped startup from Vienna, Austria – a hit with developers for technology that underpins the user experience for some of the world’s most popular apps – doubles its momentum and announces its first outside investment in a large round of growth in the Financing.
PSPDFkit – which provides APIs and an SDK that developers use to support document processing features like e-signing, viewing and editing documents, collaboration, and more – has raised 100 million euros ($ 116 million). Funding comes from a single investor, Insight Partners.
PSPDFkit is already profitable and has been for a while, so this investment is about accelerating the pace of growth. The company plans to use the investment to develop more developer tools and make strategic acquisitions (co-founder and CEO Jonathan Rhyne doesn’t know what other than to expand the range of useful tools it offers); and for the first time undertake joint efforts in the areas of sales and marketing.
Much of PSPDFkit’s growth to date has been through word of mouth, a strategy that has come very far so far. Customers include Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, Volkswagen, Fabasoft, Wolters Kluwer Germany and the European Patent Office, with whom the company works under NDA.
In many cases, not every company is happy to admit how much of their user experience and technology has been built by third parties, and so is the situation where and how PSPDFkit is used, but the fact remains that it is implicitly huge: overall, the PSPDFkit’s technology through its APIs and SDKs now has 1 billion users in 150 countries.
Unsurprisingly, this pull has also resulted in PSPDFkit having great acquisition interest over the years. Big tech companies that are developing productivity tools, already working with developers, and already very active in mobile apps and cloud services, have all knocked on the door of PSPDFkit. While the startup won’t reveal its valuation, you can imagine that given its size and profitable status, this latest round has definitely made it a more expensive buy. (And if everything goes according to plan, it will be even more.)
The story goes on
The story of PSPDFkit is an interesting one that reflects much of how mobile development itself has grown over the years.
The company originally started around 2011 as a framework and toolset created by Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger, who was already involved in the iOS developer community and saw a market need for document manipulation functions such as e-signing, document editing and document viewing in a number of apps . Apps allowed us to turn many things into virtual experiences, and paper became one of the first things to hit the market.
That need turned out to be a classic use case to create this functionality and turn it into something that many others can access through SDKs and APIs: document manipulation tools – even something as basic as previewing a file contained in a cloud is. based folders – are very difficult to create from scratch, are not necessarily part of the core business of a company, but are nevertheless central to the way they work.
Steinberger’s framework thus became one of the early examples of how SDKs and APIs can be used to integrate different services and functionalities into other apps. B. Neobanks; embedded payments, e.g. Stripe and others; embedded communications, e.g. Twilio, Sinch, etc .; and so forth.
(The name PSPDFkit was a nod to Peter Steinberger’s initials; PDF because PDFs were and will remain the company’s original focus; and “kit” referring to the SDK that it was.)
When the creation and use of mobile apps began, the Steinberger framework also began, and soon Martin Schürrer joined it in building it. Rhyne – who worked as a developer attorney in the United States – then became her attorney after meeting her at a developer event. Soon in this relationship the three realized that not only was there a real, growing business, but that Steinberger and Schürrer also had little interest in it. By 2014 Rhyne gave up the legal profession and became the third co-founder with Steinberger and Schürrer in Vienna and Rhyne based in North Carolina in the USA
With this round, Steinberger and Schürrer are retiring from their full-time positions, but remain “heavily invested” in the business while Rhyne remains as CEO.
From then on, things moved quickly, in line with the meteoric rise of the apps themselves.
Starting with iOS, PSPDFkit today offers tools that can be used to build apps on Android and on the web with Flutter and React Native. The strategy is to build a larger platform to handle several related functions that developers may want to use in relation to documents and possibly the wider world of productivity.
Rhyne’s basic description of what PSPDFkit and its customers are doing today is “obsolete paper”. But over time – much like how Stripe has moved from its core role of providing APIs for payments to a broader range of transaction-related services – PSPDFkit also sees the possibility of doing more, not least because of expectations the world has risen too have changed.
For example, Rhyne recalled how PSPDFkit launched a real-time collaboration platform in 2015, “but we thought, ‘Man, it’s not getting through, people don’t really want to use that.'” Then Covid-19 happened, he continued: ” Now every single customer says, ‘That looks great. Yes, we want to use that …’ I think we’re seeing a change in the way people interact with documents. “
That speaks for many opportunities for both the startup and its investors.
“Software developers and engineers are on the cutting edge of work simply because of their craft,” said Ryan Hinkle, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “The way they work and collaborate should also be up to date. With PSPDFKit’s software development kits and hosted solutions, the company is revolutionizing document processing for companies and the developers they hire to keep the company at the forefront of innovation. Insight is excited to play a role in the company’s growth. ”Hinkle comes into play with this round.
