A San Francisco technology company with a majority of its employees in St. Petersburg said it is now worth over $1 billion, thanks to its latest investment.
PandaDoc announced Wednesday it raised a Series C round for an undisclosed amount, led by Canada-based OMERS Growth Equity and San Francisco-bases G Squared. The round also had participation from Altos Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, One Peak Partners, and M12, which is Microsoft's venture capital fund.
The company specializes in e-signatures, allowing documents to be created and shared online and signed. The company will use the latest funding to expand into new verticals, including education. Company leaders are also hopeful to expand further globally and increase access for developers to integrate PandaDoc with other software.
The news comes after the company raised $30 million in its Series B round in mid-2020, a follow-on to $15 million raised in 2017 for the same round.
"It's something we've been striving for, for a long time as an organization," Nate Gilmore, PandaDoc's chief revenue officer, said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Business Journal. "We’re a VC-backed company, so we want to raise money for better valuations, to be able to invest going forward, and ultimately it's building a great product and taking it to market."
It's the latest in a growing trend in the Tampa Bay region. While other companies remain headquartered elsewhere, their newly boosted valuations can help the region reap the rewards. Boston-based Drift, which has an office in Tampa, announced earlier this month it had become a unicorn. San Francisco-based HomeLight raised more than $300 million in September and said it planned to use part of the funding to fuel hiring in the Tampa Bay region.
"What we’re seeing is that geography is going to be more about what fits your lifestyle, and I think Tampa has so much to offer," Drift's co-founder Elias Torres said in a previous interview with the Business Journal. "From a business perspective, it's become such a distributed system — investors are investing all over the world."
When PandaDoc opened its St. Petersburg office in 2017, it was dubbed its "eastern headquarters." The San Francisco main headquarters has roughly 10 employees and 90 in the St. Pete location.
"We’re definitely staying in St. Pete — I have no intention of moving," Gilmore said.
He added several executives live in St. Petersburg, including the company's CTO. While the U.S. offices are currently 100% remote, Gilmore believes the Tampa Bay region can help the company continue to thrive.
"The whole Tampa-St. Pete area, it's a large population area to draw from," he said. "And Florida, in general, is starting to draw software companies. Florida has a good work-life balance, it's affordable, and it's a large area that we can recruit from."
