Main menu

Pages

Evolutionary Biologist Builds AirSlate into Fast-Growing Document Workflow Business

featured image

According to Grandview Research, the global document workflow management software market is a large and growing business estimated to reach $8.52 billion by 2021 and $55.35 billion by 2028.

The company airSlate is committed to this by focusing on the needs of individual small and medium-sized users and using scientific methods to constantly test and learn their way to product development, customer satisfaction and market share growth. Confused categories.

Boston-based airSlate began life as PDFFiller in 2008, a company founded by Vadim Yasinovsky, who developed a way to create editable forms and documents from PDF files. The company grew until Borya Shakhnovich, a friend of Yasinovsky’s, became his CEO, expanding the company into document-his workflows and his digital transformation, turning the company into a rapidly growing software-his business. I had a hard time. This founder’s journey story is based on an interview with Shakunovich.

Prior to airSlate, Shakhnovich was the founder of Orwik, a community network of scientists and research institutions, and Yasinovsky was one of his investors. “I met one of my investors who was running PDFfiller at the time, and I said, ‘Look, I have this marketing tech. Why don’t you try it?” And he said, “I don’t know anything about how to apply this marketing technology, so why don’t you build it with me?” And that’s how the airSlate was really born, ”he says Shakhnovich.

At the time, PDFfiller was a one-person company with $400,000 in annual revenue. Using Shakhnovich’s technical and business knowledge, the two self-started his PDFfiller, which has grown to 160,000 customers, 160 employees, and $60 million in annual revenue. With Shakhnovich as his CEO, the company has significantly expanded its product offering and officially became airSlate in 2018.

Today, the company has established itself as a global SaaS technology company that provides no-code business process automation and document management solutions for businesses of all sizes. According to Shakhnovich, its PDF editing, e-signature workflow, and business process automation solutions enable users to solve document workflow challenges more easily and at a lower cost than other enterprise his software his providers.

The company continues to experience significant growth, with revenue growing 50% year-over-year, expanding its customer base, and including partner collaborations with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Microsoft, Samsung, SoftwareOne, Xerox, and more. I’m here. “We now have over a million customers and about 1,000 employees,” he says Shakhnovich.

As a result, the company has raised a total of $181.5 million in venture funding to date. In his latest $51.5 million fundraising on June 16, 2022, led by G Squared, which included a strategic partnership with UiPath, airSlate was valued at his $1.25 billion. Other investors include Silicon Valley Bank, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, High Sage Ventures, General Catalyst, Horizon Capital and others. “We have been running this business almost cash flow neutral for the last 10 years. So all the money we raise is either on the balance sheet or used for M&A,” he said Shakhnovich. says.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Shakhnovich was an evolutionary biologist who worked in business with an evolutionary design model and attributes his success as a leader to his academic training. “Whether using physics to understand customer acquisition or biology to understand customer retention, I like the multidisciplinary approach to solving complex problems. Startups and online marketing. Before joining , I taught bioinformatics at BU and did systems biology research at Harvard University,” says Shakhnovich.

Shakhnovic grew up in Russia until the age of 11. His family moved to the United States in 1990 when his father became a professor of chemistry at Harvard University. Shakhnovic followed in his father’s footsteps and pursued his academic career. He attended the University of Illinois in Champaign he Urbana. “I studied computational biophysics, so it has nothing to do with business,” he says Shakhnovich. After his graduation, he received a PhD in bioinformatics from Boston University. Bioinformatics is the statistical analysis of biological systems such as genes, proteins and evolution. He then became a professor of bioinformatics at Boston University in 2004, and shortly thereafter he moved to Harvard University in 2006, where he led the Systems Biology group.

In 2008, just before the financial crisis began, he left Harvard to start his own business. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always wanted to create my own business. It’s like running a business, ”he says Shakhnovich.

He founded Orwik, an expert network for researchers aimed at solving the problem of transparency in the academic process, but after four years of trying to make it work, the business went out of business. It never went on track. “I made all the mistakes that novice entrepreneurs make. I started building the company for myself, not for the customer, building the product without testing it in the market,” he said. says Shakhnovich. He apparently learned a lesson well in the creation and exponential growth of airSlate.

in the future? “Over the next 5-10 years, we hope to train 1 million people to use our technology to increase the efficiency and value of their business. We want to turn these former employees into business-critical employees, earning $100,000 to $120,000, and that’s the mission of the entire company,” concludes Shakhnovich.

.

Comments