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Exclusive: SeamlessDocs Raises $7.5M in Funding, Pushes into State Government

The company has expanded beyond its core services and is looking to grow.

SeamlessDocs, which started out digitizing PDFs for local government and has since expanded to include more digital services and payments, has raised a $7.5 million Series B funding round.

The round, led by SJF Ventures, puts SeamlessDocs up to $18.5 million in total funding since it launched about six years ago. The company plans on using the new money for a few different purposes, but a major push going forward will be toward the Government Relationship Management product — one of the company’s newer additions.

“We’re going all in on our GRM,” said Jonathon Ende, SeamlessDocs’ chief executive officer.

The GRM product, basically customer relationship management software built specifically for government, helps public servants and citizens track how things like permits and applications are moving through the system and manage the workflows involved.

“Now you can come in and you can check the status, you can do uploads, update, and now … they don’t have to pick up the phone,” Ende said.

The company is also pushing a third piece to its suite of products — Service Center, a way for customers to bring together forms in one place, which SeamlessDocs released just a couple of months ago. And as it sells those new products, SeamlessDocs is also pushing into a new space: states.

In its infancy, the company served small businesses that needed to automate their forms. Soon after, it discovered how large a need there was in government for that exact service.

But until recently, SeamlessDocs has largely been operating at the local level, starting with smaller cities and moving up to larger clients like Newark, N.J., and Austin, Texas. More than 27 million people have used SeamlessDocs forms, according to a company press release.

States are a tad more complicated to serve, according to Ende — but that just means there’s more opportunity there.

“It’s incredible,” he said. “We’re working with one state government that has 10,000 PDF forms.”

There are already some pretty established players in this space: NIC and PayIt help governments set up digital services and accept payments for applications, for example.

But Ende said those companies tend to take on only a portion of what governments, especially the big ones like states, handle when it comes to forms. They will offer digital applications for some services, but not necessarily for the really esoteric forms — pet registration, vaccination affidavits, customer equipment forms, etc.

That’s where SeamlessDocs built its reputation, quickly digitizing forms and offering governments a faster way to process those forms.

“We’re the long-tail form people,” Ende said.

Next to companies like Accela and NIC, SeamlessDocs is a baby. But relative to a lot of other gov tech startups, like One Concern, Binti and ProudCity, it’s an old-timer. Ende said he’s seen governments evolve a lot since he started working with them.

“People were asking, ‘What do you mean cloud, what is SaaS?’” he said.

State and local government still have quite a ways to go when it comes to embracing the cloud, but they are undeniably moving in that direction. Ende has noticed the trend as well.

“We’re seeing every day people are more open to technology, more open to the cloud, more open to these online solutions, and I would say even expecting more,” he said.

Joining SJF Ventures on the Series B round is Motorola Solutions, Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator, NY State Innovation Ventures, CapRock and some “super angel” investors.

Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.