E-signature company DocuSign Inc. posted its fiscal second-quarter results today, easily beating Wall Street’s expectations, but the strong performance wasn’t enough to prevent its stock diving in after-hours trading.

The company is one of several tech firms to have seen demand for its services rise thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, though a broad market selloff today took some of the shine off that success for the moment.

The company, which sells a platform to manage digital transactions, reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 17 cents per share on revenue of $342.2 million, up 45% from a year ago. Wall Street had expected DocuSign to report earnings of just 8 cents per share on revenue of $318.5 million.

DocuSign’s numbers looked good across the board. The company’s subscription revenue came to $323.6 million in the quarter, up 47% from a year ago. Professional services and other revenue hit $18.6 million, up 64%, while its billings in the quarter came to $405.7 million, up 25%.

DocuSign Chief Executive Dan Springer (pictured) said the company’s billings growth was proof that the need for electronic and remote digital transactions has never been stronger. “We are just scratching the surface of our Agreement Cloud opportunity and believe we are increasingly becoming an essential cloud-software platform for organizations of all sizes,” Springer said.

Despite the positive results, DocuSign’s stock fell more than 8% in after-hours trading, following a huge swoon in tech stocks and the overall market in the regular trading session.

DocuSign made an important acquisition during the quarter, buying a company called Liveoak Technologies Inc. that sells software that lets people electronically prepare, sign and manage contract agreements. The company said at the time that it plans to integrate Liveoak’s technology quickly into its Agreement Cloud platform to power a new product it will launch called DocuSign Notary for remote notarization services.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that DocuSign is one of the winners of the accelerated digitization that’s came about due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He added that it’s encouraging to see it step up its investment in its products.

“It’s good to see the R&D quota going up, and the acquisition of LiveOak, which enables video conference-based document signing to replace the need to have signatories physically present in the same place is a massive step forward,” Mueller said. “However, the company still needs to deliver a net profit, and it hasn’t made much progress there. If profitability doesn’t come closer during a 40%-plus growth quarter, when will it?”

Looking ahead, DocuSign said it’s confident that its hot streak will carry on into future months. For the third quarter, the company is forecasting revenue of $358 million to $362 million, well ahead of the analyst consensus of $335.1 million.

For the full year, DocuSign estimates revenue of between $1.384 billion and $1.388 billion, ahead of Wall Street’s $1.32 billion estimate.

Photo: DocuSign/Facebook