Why We Started SignForge

We started SignForge because a company in Bangalore was being treated like a captive customer by a well-known e-signature platform — and because the problems went deeper than price.

It was Diwali season 2025. A friend who works at a firm in Whitefield invited me for coffee. The calendar invite simply said “Katchup over Koffee.” We talked about our kids, traffic, office politics. Then his phone rang. It was the sales representative from a very large e-signature company. The call lasted three or four minutes. When he hung up he was furious.

The product was up for renewal. Prices had risen. There had been over-usage the previous month, and they were being charged double for it. He did the quick math out loud: they were paying roughly $9 per document sent for signature and still felt they were being treated poorly. He did not like being surprised that way.

That conversation became a turning point. At the time my co-founder and CTO Abhishek Sharma and I were already building inside the CTRL 18 house (Kritis was underway and Trevos was being conceived). We could not ignore the entrepreneurial question: is there room for a better approach?

We researched the market, the required technology, the marketing play, and the formidable competitors. We took the idea to our mentor. His response was blunt: “If you can give me one reason other than price why someone would leave the famous platform, I will take the idea seriously.”

We went back to the drawing board and listed the real pain points a new player could address. Price was only the surface. The deeper issues included:

·      Surprise billing and opaque over-usage charges

·      Limited ability for the signed document itself to carry independent, long-lived proof

·      Dependence on the vendor remaining active and reachable for verification

·      Weak offline or vendor-independent verification options

Those were the reasons beyond price. The mentor gave the green light. We started building.

Today SignForge exists so that every signed PDF carries its own cryptographic proof — a SHA-256 hash, an ECDSA signature, a W3C verifiable credential, and a Merkle log entry — that can be checked offline by anyone, without a SignForge account, without a special reader, and even if the service itself is no longer running. The document’s evidence is meant to outlive the vendor.

We are still early. A growing number of users and a handful of enterprise customers have begun to use the platform. The original insight remains the same: people should not have to accept surprise pricing or vendor-dependent proof simply because they need documents signed.

If you are evaluating e-signature tools, ask one practical question of every platform: What happens to the proof when the vendor is no longer in the picture? That question is why SignForge exists.