8/17/2023

Announcing Pre-Seed and Open Metrics

Timur Ercan

Co-Founder

Today I'm happy to announce that we closed a $1.25M Pre-Seed round for Documenso, bringing our total funding to $1.54M. The round actually closed last month, we just were sneaky about it.

Two more for the road (to open signing)

We're ecstatic to welcome OSS Capital and especially Joseph Jacks to the inner circle of the open signing revolution. We're also fortunate to be joined by Orrick's very own John Harrison and his legal experience. For those who are wondering, yes, the round was, of course, signed using Documenso.

Open Source, Open Metrics

If you follow us, you know we're firmly committed to the open source values of openness and transparency. For us, this includes not only the code side of things but also the business. As we aim to build trust among our investors, customers, and partners, we want to be open about what's going on. We also want to allow everyone to learn from our data and choices, just as we did from so many other COSS (Commercial Open Source) startups. The term "Open Startup" isn't precisely defined (and probably will never be, just like startup). There is however a great write-up about the basics by the founder of our favorite open source scheduling tool Cal.com.

The two main takeaways are:

• "Any Startup that shares its metrics as open as technically and operationally possible is an Open Startup."
• "Why should I care? Frankly speaking, Open Startups have a tough time screwing you over."

The more open the culture, the less shady stuff is going on. While this may sound trivial, the implications are profound. A new generation of organizations, operating more ethically and responsibly simply because everything is out in the open.

For us, there are two sides to being an Open Startup:

• The company side: Sharing Financial KPIs like growth, funding, team structure, salary, internal processes, and tools.
• The product side: Sharing insights and data like usage, reach, and GitHub activity.

Both sides aim to contribute to the global knowledge base of how startups work, specifically COSS startups. As we see more and more COSS, best practices and business insights should be broadly available to let the space mature. As we contribute code to the global community, we also contribute our business knowledge to help bring about even more COSS.

Starting today, we're releasing a lot of our data as part of the Open Startup movement. You can find the juicy details on our funding and more here: documen.so/open

• Funding
• Metrics
• Open Startup