2022: Year in Review

Letter from the CEO

2022 was a year of growth and opportunity. 2023 will be a year of momentum.

2022 was a year of growth at PSPDFKit: growing customers, growing our product offerings, growing team members, and growing relationships. Our business growth was driven by key customer wins across the financial services, construction, healthcare, and legal industries. Meanwhile, the number of components, features, and product capabilities also grew exponentially.

In addition, we saw literal growth at PSPDFKit. Thanks to 2021’s strategic investment from Insight Partners, in the first half of the year, we went through three mergers — Muhimbi, ORPALIS, and Aquaforest — which not only strengthened and diversified our product offering, but also helped us grow in numbers. In the second half of the year, we continued adding and filling roles, resulting in an increase of 97 percent in the number of people. And a large part of that time was spent getting to know one another, learning to work together in a new situation, and becoming better communicators.

Suffice to say, if the first 10 years of PSPDFKit were about putting down roots, the next 10 are about growing, yes, but also thriving. We continue to do our best to stay true to the values that got us here, and the fruits of our labor are that we left 2022 having already begun to change the world with our products, with an incredible foundation and momentum to scale those efforts further.

As always, thank you for your support, partnership, and trust.

We’re just getting started.

Jonathan D. Rhyne

Record Numbers in 2022

In 2022, we saw record numbers and unprecedented business growth — nearly doubling our annual recurring revenue (ARR) year-over-year. This demonstrates that there’s a significant need in the market for our document technology platform. More and more businesses are looking to implement their digital transformation strategies, and “do more with less” by using our platform to drive efficiency and growth, and that makes us excited for what’s to come in the next 12 months.

New Companies

We also grew our company quite literally — from just above 50 people to more than 140. Part of that growth was fueled by the merger of three companies. In the first part of the year, U.K.-based Muhimbi, a leading software solution provider for cloud and on-premises document management systems, joined the PSPDFKit family. Then in May, we welcomed France-based ORPALIS Imaging Technologies and U.K.-based Aquaforest, leading providers of document imaging components and enterprise software solutions.

Nearly overnight, we doubled in number and went from having colleagues in 18 countries to colleagues in 26 countries. In the process, we faced the logistical challenges of things like how to run meetings, incorporate teams, work with new tools, and divide responsibilities. It’s been an adjustment process, but it’s also been an important reminder to look to our core values to guide us in decision making and interactions with one another.

New Hires

Over the course of the year, 64 new PSPDFKitties joined the ranks. We also created and filled some key roles that will help us continue strengthening and expanding our product offering, including:

• Chris Rosbrook, CFO

• Chris Wilson, CRO

• Johan Johansson, CMO

• Loïc Carrère, Principal Engineer

• Matej Bukovinski, VP of Engineering

• Miloš Đekić, VP of Product

• Nick Johansson, VP of Marketing

• Richard Malloy, VP of Sales

• Serana Warren, Information Security Officer

• Megan Moore, Senior Director of Business Operations

New Products and Components

In response to customer requests and needs, we offered new integrations, created new components, and expanded existing tools to new platforms:

• Web Integrations for Microsoft Platforms — Integrate web browser-based PDF viewing, annotation, editing, signing, form filling, and more to your SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive apps.

• Measurement Tools — Integrate a measuring tool into your app to enable your users to measure the distance, perimeter, and area of drawings in a document.

• Content Editor — Give users the freedom to edit original PDF text directly in your app or their workflows with a built-in content editing UI.

• PDF Generation on React Native and Flutter — Create PDF documents within your React Native and Flutter apps, including generating PDF forms from HTML form layouts.

• Form Creator on Web — Use the new form creator built-in UI to create forms from scratch or add multiple form fields to an existing PDF document through widget annotations.

New Features

In addition to new products, we added several new features to take our existing components to the next level:

• Digital Signatures — Extended support for RSA-PSS digital signatures on iOS, Android, and Windows.

• Electronic Signatures — New APIs that enable you to create a signing workflow suited for every use case.

• Annotations — New annotation capabilities, including cloud annotations on iOS and Android, along with built-in cloudy and dashed shape variants on Web.

• User Interface (UI) — A variety of improvements and additions to our UI, including color picker customization on Windows and Web that enables you to change predefined color presets and allows users to add custom colors to the palette via the UI; sidebar customization options on Web; and the addition of image rotation, media annotations, and a link annotation creation UI on Web.

• Instant Comments —Instant Collaboration Permissions on iOS, a feature that enables fine-grained control of editing capabilities.

• PDF Generation — Define custom headers and footers in HTML templates, and configure PDF generation timeout in Processor.

• Performance — Dramatically improved document operations on Web and Windows.

• Localization — The addition of Hebrew localization to iOS and Windows.

A Redesigned Demo

Alongside all the new and improved functionality, we prioritized overhauling our Web Demo. The demo was first developed in 2018, and since then, our tech has significantly improved. So not only did we want to showcase what it’s capable of, but we also wanted to make it easier for users to discover and test those features.

If you haven’t yet, you can try it out yourself.

Public Presentations and Talks

We believe it’s important to have a presence beyond our website and social media, which is why we host webinars, attend conferences, write papers, and give talks. In 2022, we kept ourselves extra busy, both online and offline.

Webinars

It’s always been important to us to connect and communicate directly with our customers, and we realized webinars are an opportunity to do exactly that. In 2022, we dove in headfirst, hosting 19 in total.

Webinars are a chance for customers and potential customers to learn about new products and releases and see firsthand how they work. Additionally, they provide the opportunity to hear from and communicate directly with the developers who build our SDK. As a bonus, the feedback we receive gives us ideas on how to continue improving our SDKs. We found the format to be successful, we had a lot of great questions and positive interaction, and we’ve already planned some for this year.

If you want to know what you missed, you can watch the recordings.

Conferences

Our team attended a handful of important industry conferences in the latter half of the year. Aquaforest and Muhimbi had a booth at the European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference 2022; Ritesh Kumar from the Web team was an emcee at React India; and two of our colleagues — Elodie Tellier and Neil Pitman — gave talks at PDF Days Europe:

• Facing a pandemic: hit and miss of PDF, how could we have done better?

• Smart Legal Contracts and PDF

• How document understanding can leverage your PDF workflow

Additionally, our colleague Dr. Louisa Kessi led an industry workshop and was a member of the technical lead committee at RTIP2R, a conference dedicated to sharing advanced research and trends related to image processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, and machine learning.

Meetups

We also had a presence at meetups in South America. Guillermo Peralta Scura from the Web team gave a talk on Resumability in Qwik, and Enmanuel Ruffinelli from the Design team gave talks about his career and about his experience working remotely and speaking English.

Security

We remain dedicated to protecting our users and safeguarding their systems, as demonstrated by our flawless 10-year track record of no security vulnerabilities or exposures. To ensure that security remains a priority as we grow, we hired Serana Warren as Information Security Officer. She’s responsible for implementing and overseeing company-wide security policies to ensure that our network security practices are consistently leading edge, and that our users’ data is suitably safeguarded.

As an additional commitment to security, PSPDFKit also underwent and successfully completed the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 1 audit. This audit measures the security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy of an organization’s data processing systems and determines whether adequate safeguards and controls are in place.

Finally, we know there are many misconceptions regarding the security of open source technology (in general), as well as the use of open source technology within PDF toolkits and platforms, so we researched and wrote about the open source PDF renderer PDFium. PDFium is the most widely used PDF rendering library worldwide, and it’s used as the PDF engine powering all our PSPDFKit SDKs. To learn more about this topic, refer to our posts outlining why PDFium is a trusted platform for PDF rendering and why PSPDFKit is supporting PDFium.

Culture

With so much growth and change, one of our biggest concerns was how we’d maintain and grow our culture. But while some things have inevitably changed with the growth of our company, there’s a lot that has remained the same. And we realized that one of the best ways to preserve a culture is to invest in it, which we did a lot of in 2022.

Retreat

As our first retreat in nearly two years grew closer, everyone was wondering how it would be with 100+ people in the same room. What would it be like meeting so many new faces? Would we get along and enjoy ourselves? Would it be productive or chaotic? Would it even work logistically?

During that week in Lisbon, our CEO remarked multiple times how familiar it felt. He too had the fear that this retreat would somehow be “different” — and of course, in many ways it was — but we experienced that it still felt very much the same. There may have been more people in the room, but it still had that same vibe, that same PSPDFKit essence, of past retreats.

And overall, we had a really great time. Not only did we learn and accomplish a lot, but we had fun trying Portuguese food, doing team building exercises, exploring the city with our colleagues, and much more.

Second Annual Talent Show

Another highlight of the year was our second annual talent show. In early 2021, we hosted our first annual talent show — though at the time, we didn’t know it would be an annual thing. We had a blast, and so when it was announced that we’d be holding another talent show in December 2022, everyone was excited — suddenly we had a new pool of talent to draw from!

This time around, we had entries of people playing instruments and singing, speed drawing, doing sports like boxing and Zumba and dressage, performing yo-yo tricks while demonstrating language skills, and showing off how they use morning meetings to bake. It was another success, and some of us might already be preparing our acts for this year’s event…

Social

In addition to official social events, we also had a lot more unofficial ones. New people meant increased activity on Slack, with channels like #family, #parenting, #book-club, #culture, #music, and #tistheseason as dedicated places to discuss non-work things.

Another fun one was #worldcup2022, where we congregated during games to chat, and where we shared soccer-related news and hot takes. We also had a pool of 26 people who made bets on who would win the various matches — not to mention, a cat that (mostly) accurately predicted who would win the games. At times, it got pretty heated, but we all had a really fun time being competitive and analyzing the games.

We also continued using Donut; the channel has more than 50 members who are paired with another member every three weeks. We had video calls with our colleagues and shared summaries of what we talked about in the #donut-buddies channel.

New Blog Posts Published

We’ve always prioritized our blog as a place to showcase our products and highlight our learnings, and in 2022, we continued with this trend. We published 169 blog posts — 35 more than in the year before!

Our top-five most popular blogs from 2022 are shown below.

Customer Initiative

In 2021, we planted 10 trees per customer via One Tree Planted. For 2022, we knew we wanted to do something similar by donating to an initiative that helps improve the planet and the lives of people. But we also wanted to get input directly from our customers. So at the end of the year, we sent out a survey with a choice of five potential places we could donate to. The choice with the most votes was the gift of warmth for families in Ukraine.

Future Outlook

As you can tell from above, we’ve been busy. This past year was a year for record growth as a company, and we’re looking to build on those investments well into 2023 and beyond. In light of the current macroeconomic situation, we consider ourselves fortunate that our products can help companies reduce costs, increase efficiency, and boost productivity for their employees and customers. We continue to affirm that the best way to revolutionize digital documents is through partnering with and supporting talented developers with tools that allow them to create the art of the possible for their colleagues, customers, and users. We believe that the time is upon us now to rethink what digital paper can mean — to rethink how we can unify, simplify, and leverage the technologies that already exist and that will be discovered in the near future to bring the world into the next phase of what a document can be.

We look forward to all our customers, partners, and supporters joining us on this journey. We cannot thank you all enough for putting your trust in us, and we look forward to another year of serving you all.

We’re just getting started…