Agree.com Raises $7.2 Million to Combine Payments and e-Signatures
e-Signature platform Agree.com has reportedly raised $7.2 million in new funding.
The company announced its seed round in an interview with TechCrunch Tuesday (May 6), arguing that it thinks it can compete with the likes of Docusign because of a key differentiator: its platform offers payment processing and invoicing.
“At the end of almost every signature, someone has to pay someone money,” CEO Marty Ringlein told TechCrunch. “We combine what has historically been a disjointed and fragmented workflow to make signing better and payments faster.”
The report noted that because Agree makes its money from transaction fees for any money movement carried out by its platform, the company has made e-signatures free to users.
According to the report, Agree uses artificial intelligence (AI) along with optimal character recognition software to auto-detect and label all of a contract’s input fields and signature blocks. It can also identify and extract payment terms to dynamically generate invoices.
Ringlein believes that due to its multitasking approach, Agree.com has the potential to replace traditional e-signature and invoicing and accounts receivable tools like Bill.com.
“Agree extracts every character, indentation, semicolon, and hyphen to not only understand the type of contract being signed, but make it fully editable and collaborative with commenting, redlining, and version control,” Ringlein told TechCrunch.
The new funding comes as business processes that had long been considered manual ones are being replaced with more digitized versions, as PYMNTS wrote in April.
It was a shift, that report said, “underpinned by machine-readable formats, API-first ecosystems and continuous data flows” that allowed for automation at scale. For enterprises, adapting to structured data standards, like ISO 20022 for payments, and investing in systems that can learn from transactional patterns is a critical step toward efficiency and efficacy.
“The really progressive companies are getting in front of [the transition to digital payments],” WEX President of Corporate Payments Eric Frankovic told PYMNTS in April. “… They have to cut costs, they have to control costs, they have to keep a healthy supply chain. And in order to do that, they have to start those conversations.”
This shift isn’t just about digitizing old processes but also rethinking what back-office operations could look like in a world where AI and real-time data are increasingly the norm.
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that more than eight in 10 CFOs at large companies are either already employing AI or considering adopting it for core financial functions such as accounts payable, or for paying suppliers, vendors and contractors.
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