[Funding alert] EthSign raises $12M led by Sequoia Capital India, Mirana Ventures

EthSign is announcing a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital India and Mirana Ventures (venture partner of BitDAO and Bybit), along with participation from Sequoia Capital and Sequoia Capital China. 

The startup is building end-user applications under a Web3 native philosophy. In Web3, user identity is represented by private keys, data is encrypted and stored in the decentralised network, and fund transfer is completed seamlessly through smart contracts.

“Cryptography, decentralisation, openness EthSign is designed to empower 10,000,000 users and decentralised organisations,” said Xin Yan, Project Lead at EthSign. In 2022, the team is set to prioritise product development and community growth. 

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Many of EthSign’s backers used EthSign Signature during the fundraising process. Other notable investors in the round include: Amber Group, Hack VC, Circle Ventures, NGC Ventures, Hashkey, Infinity Ventures Crypto (IVC), IOSG Ventures, Tess Ventures, Folius Ventures, Shima Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, Hash Global, KB Ventures, Mask Network, Matrixport, Synaps.io, AV Blockchain Fund, Goodwater Capital, Emoote, and Next Web Capital.

Angel investors include Balaji Srinivasan, Tegan Kline (The Graph), Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon), Aniket and Ahmed (Biconomy), Liang Xinjun (Fosun International), Alex Shin (Hashed), Sid Powell (Maple.Finance), Li Ning, DiscusFish (Cobo), Thomas Vu (Riot Games), Tekin Salimi, MissBitcoin, Jaeson Ma (88 Rising) and many more.

EthSign aims to leverage the newest blockchain techstack to build solutions for the most tangible issues. The crypto assets allow people the freedom to form global connections and deploy capital across borders. Investments, grants, paying freelancers, and bounties are all examples of Web3 scenarios where individuals, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), and even Web2 institutions can interact via the on-chain transfer of capital.

The startup is building applications that bridge the crypto and traditional worlds, thereby initiating the mass adoption of Web3.  As EthSign’s user base and product lines grow, immense value can be extracted from smart contract data depicting business interactions. The team is poised to release documents on monitoring and verifying addresses/signatures in EthSign’s smart contract, and an open-sourced data dashboard and API to provide accessibility to the community. The team has plans to leverage their wealth of multidimensional on-chain data to map social networks and assign credit scores.

“Initially, we built EthSign as a decentralised Docusign for traditional and Web3 entities to conduct PDF agreements on the blockchain But, EthSign is set to catalyse the next era of agreement where the execution of terms can be trustless and automated. Instead of trusting the counter-parties and legal jurisdictions, we are creating code-based contracts on top of PDF contract terms, with the end-goal being completely self-executable agreements,” explained Potter Li, Business Lead at EthSign.

EthSign Signatures, the team’s first product, is live on mainet and multiple EVM-compatible networks, amassing more than 10,000 users. EthSign Signature utilises a Web3 tech stack to offer a fully-decentralised version of a legally binding e-signature service. The team is developing a new version of EthSign Signatures, making bold attempts in terms of UX and functionality that will be launched in Q2 2022. 

“Mirana Ventures is proud to back EthSign. As BitDAO’s venture partner, we are thrilled to see EthSign's progress on building a series of DAO tools that would facilitate the adoption of Web3, and we support EthSign’s roadmap to empower decentralised organisations and individuals,” said David Toh, Partner, Mirana Ventures.

EthSign Smart Agreements, a customisable escrow framework that enables the terms of electronic agreements to automatically execute based on predetermined, measurable on/off-chain trigger conditions, is slated to launch in Q3 2022.

Jack Xu, Technology Lead at EthSign explained “We have a series of exciting products in the pipeline, from next-gen EthSign to on-chain DAO and VC toolkits. More details will be available when they are ready but we cannot wait to put them in action and revolutionise the world of on-chain agreements and investments.” 

DAOs, unions, investment DAOs, and crypto projects around the world are collaborating at unprecedented rates. It is hard to onramp Web2 businesses to this decentralised governance model as it requires a whole suite of operating systems to manage structures, allocate work, and transfer funds. Based on the two core products, EthSign is growing by collaborating with these entities to provide use-case specific solutions like decentralised governance, decentralised bounty boards, payroll management, etc. 

“EthSign is unlocking the full potential of smart contracts by making it easy for organisations and individuals to seamlessly adopt and incorporate them in their daily workflows and business scenarios. We believe it can become the de-facto platform for multiparty collaboration and consensus across both Web2 and Web3.” Rohit Agarwal, Principal, Sequoia India. 

Based on EthSign’s current technology, their newest product in development is EthSign Tokentable, a one-stop, on-chain investment tool for VCs, angels, and DAOs to automate the process of fundraising and vesting in Web3. Its major features include contract signing, fund transfer, cap-table management, token vesting, and more.