When your startup goes through due diligence for an investment round or an exit, investor’s or buyer’s legal counsel will typically send a laundry list of document requests. These documents range from the startup’s bylaws to stock option agreements to third party contracts to prior financing documents.
Quite often, these diligence materials are not readily available and/or can be difficult to track down. Or, only pieces of documents can be found (e.g, a signature page rather than the full document).
This leads to “corporate cleanup” which is ultimately a time consuming and expensive process. Most of this time and expense can be prevented with the use of a quality scanner. (In our experience, online signature services are only good for a one-off contract.)
Good scanners today won’t wreck your burn rate. For example, the fujitsu line of scanners like the iX500 can usually be found in the $420 to $495 range. We have a fujitsu here as a backup scanner to our large Bizhub.
If your startup raises a pre-seed round in the low six figures or more, it should purchase a scanner soon after the wire comes through. It will save time and money down the road.
2026 Update: OK, maybe investing in a DocuSign subscription is the way to go now. 🙂
Ryan RobertsStartup Lawyer
Ryan Roberts is a startup lawyer with more than two decades of experience advising on venture financings and M&A transactions totaling more than $1 billion. He is the author of the Amazon bestselling startup law book Acceleration.
