Evolutionary Biologist Builds AirSlate Into Fast-Growing Document Workflow Business – Forbes
The global document workflow management software market is a big and growing business, reaching $8.52 billion in 2021 and estimated to grow to $55.35 billion in 2028, according to Grandview Research.
One company, airSlate, disrupted the category by focusing on the needs of individual users at small and mid-sized businesses and using the scientific method to constantly test and learn its way to product development, customer satisfaction and market share growth.
Headquartered in Boston, 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. That company struggled to grow until Yasinovsky’s friend Borya Shakhnovich became CEO and broadened the company into document workflow and digital transformation that turned the company into a fast-growth software business. This founder’s journey story is based on my interview with Shakhnovich.
airSlate Co-Founder and CEO Borya Shakhnovich.
Prior to airSlate, Shakhnovich was the founder of Orwik, a community network for scientists and institutions, and Yasinovsky was one of his investors. “I came to one of my investors who was running PDFFiller at the time. And I said, ‘Look, I have this marketing technology, why don’t you apply it To PDFFiller?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know anything about how to apply this marketing technology, why don’t you come and build it with me.’ And that’s how airSlate was really born,” says Shakhnovich.
At that time, PDFFiller was a small company with $400,000 in annual revenue. Using Shakhnovich’s technology and business savvy, the team bootstrapped PDFFiller to grow to reach 160,000 customers, 160 employees and $60 million annual revenue. After several years, Shakhnovich moved into the CEO role and the company greatly expanded its product offering and formally became airSlate in 2018.
Today the company positions itself as a global SaaS technology company that provides no-code business process automation and document management solutions to companies of all sizes. Its PDF editing, e-signature workflow, and business process automation solutions allow users to solve document workflow challenges more easily and at lower cost than other enterprise software providers, according to Shakhnovich.
The company continues to experience significant growth, increasing revenue 50% year over year, expanding its customer base and including partner collaborations with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Microsoft, Samsung, SoftwareOne, Xerox and others. “Right now, we have over one million customers and about 1,000 employees,” says Shakhnovich.
As a result, the company has raised a total of $181.5 million in venture funding to date. Its most recent $51.5 million financing on June 16, 2022 led by G Squared, including a strategic partnership with UiPath, valued airSlate at $1.25 billion. Additional investors include Silicon Valley Bank, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, High Sage Ventures, General Catalyst, Horizon Capital and others. “We’ve run this business pretty much cashflow neutral throughout the last 10 years. So all of the money that we raised is either on the balance sheet or used for M&A,” says Shakhnovich.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Shakhnovich was an evolutionary biologist and approaches business with an evolutionary design model and attributes his success as a leader is to his academic training. “I like interdisciplinary approaches to solving complex problems whether using Physics to understand customer acquisition or using Biology to understand customer retention. Before my life in startups and online marketing, I used to teach bioinformatics at BU and do systems biology research at Harvard,” says Shakhnovich.
Shakhnovich grew up in Russia up until the age of eleven. His family moved to the U.S. in 1990 when his father became a professor of chemistry at Harvard. Shakhnovich followed in his father’s footstep and pursued an academic career. He attended the University of Illinois, in Urbana Champaign. “I studied computational biophysics, so nothing that’s even remotely related to business,” says Shakhnovich. After graduating, he went on to earn his PhD at Boston University in bioinformatics, which is the statistical analysis of biological systems, including genes, proteins and evolution. He then became a professor of Bioinformatics at Boston University in 2004 and soon thereafter moved over to Harvard in 2006 to lead a Systems Biology group there.
In 2008, right before the beginning of the financial crisis, he left Harvard to start his own business. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always wanted to create my own business. And in a lot of ways, being an academic is actually like running your own very small business,” says Shakhnovich.
He founded Orwik a professional network for researchers that was meant to solve the problem of transparency in the academic process, but after four years trying to make it work, the business never took off. “I made all of the mistakes that I think beginning entrepreneurs make. I started building a company for myself instead of for customers and built a product without testing it in the marketplace,” says Shakhnovich. He apparently learned his lesson well with the creation and exponential growth of airSlate.
As for the future? “Over the next five to ten years, we would like to train a million people on using our technology to increase their efficiency and value to their own business. We want to help an employee that was earning $40,000 to $50,000 and turn them into an employee that is critical to the business, earning $100,000 to $120,000. And that’s the mission of the company overall,” concludes Shakhnovich.
