Workflow automation provider Formstack LLC has raised $425 million to grow its cloud platform, which is used by more than 25,000 companies to help their workers more efficiently manage documents and forms.

The investment was announced this morning. Formstack says that growth equity firms Silversmith Capital Partners and PSG provided the funding.

PSG previously invested in Formstack three years ago. Since then, the company says that it has managed to more than triple revenues, off an undisclosed base, while maintaining profitability. Formstack also made four acquisitions between PSG’s initial investment in 2018 and the funding round announced today. With the additional $425 million it now has available for growth initiatives, the company can make yet more acquisitions to expand into new market segments. 

The four acquisitions made by Formstack since 2018 were purchases of fellow tech firms with software complementary to its own. The company used the technology it obtained through the deals to enhance its namesake cloud platform, which automates business tasks that involve documents and forms.

With Formstack’s platform, business users can partly automate the creation of frequently used documents. The platform makes it possible to set up a template and reuse it across projects, adding in custom fields as needed. To save time, Formstack enables users to customize a document by pulling in existing data from other applications such as their company’s accounting software. 

Managing forms is another major focus for Formstack. The company provides a no-code editor that allows workers to assemble forms using drag-and-drop controls. Teams with more advanced requirements have the option to add in automations. Formstack forms can send data they collect to an application, redirect users to a payments page to complete a purchase and perform other actions. 

Cleveland Clinic, Twitter Inc. and Netflix Inc. are among the more 25,000 companies that Formstack counts as customers. The company says that it has a total of more than 238,000 individual users across the organizations that use its platform.

“Customers across nearly all industries are using Formstack to build for their immediate needs — digitizing and automating business processes — and also scaling with Formstack to help meet their larger, multiyear digital transformation needs,” stated Formstack Chief Executive Officer Chris Byers. “The momentum we’re seeing continues to validate our belief that the key to digital transformation success is all about empowering nontechnical employees with no-code workflow automation solutions.”

Formstack’s plan to continue growing its customer base places an emphasis on workforce expansion. The company also intends to scale go-to-market and product development activities.

The market for software tools that automate document-related workflows is potentially significant because every organization can in theory benefit from the ability to manage its business data with less manual work. A large addressable market, in turn, translates into a significant revenue opportunity. Multiple companies are working to address this opportunity.

Rossum Inc., a startup with a document gateway that automates some of the manual work involved in organizing and processing business records, closed a $100 million funding round in October. More established industry players are joining the fray as well. Adobe Inc. recently introduced two developer services for building applications that can automate document management tasks.

Image: Formstack