The Company

Cygnet Infotech began as a services company but has now developed several standalone products including e-signing, codeless test automation, RPA, and tax technology solutions. Its digital signature product, Cygnature, is the focus of this report.

Cygnet Infotech was founded in 2000 by Niraj Hutheesing, who leads the company today, and the company is headquartered in Gujarat, India. We estimate the firm to have around 1,000 employees and annual revenues of less than US$100 million. Cygnet Infotech has customers in 35 countries worldwide but its most extensive presence is in India, Europe, and North America. In September 2021, the firm made its first acquisition: euVAT Online, a UK-based firm providing software for European tax submissions.

The Technology

Cygnet Infotech’s digital signature product, Cygnature, stood out to us because beneath the covers of the signature product itself are both robotic process automation (RPA) and blockchain. The blockchain provides an immutable, and by default distributed, audit trail that removes the need for a third party to verify the signature. In our analysis, signatures and notarized files should be recorded to blockchains to increase security, make signed documents tamperproof, and move the mechanism to a shared ledger across all parties, rather than a centralized version of the truth. The RPA functionality along with the signature capabilities provides a means to structure basic workflows for documents that require signing, again without the need for another vendor’s technology. Cygnature also has functionality for signing in bulk and coordinating multiple signers of multiple documents.

As might be expected, the Cygnature product supports 21 CFR, the compliance rules for pharma companies as per the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But it also goes further to integrate with national ID requirements for the UAE, Oman, and India.

In practice, Cygnature offers a platform that can be accessed remotely via a mobile device or laptop through two-factor authentication. All the data is encrypted in transit, and ultimately the data and files are stored in the Cygnature database. The database uses masking and steganography (data obfuscation) to make it highly secure. A unidirectional SHA3 file and a hash of the record, along with a unique ID and private key, are stored on the blockchain. All in all, it’s a comprehensive and highly secure signature system.

To be clear, this is not a system that will likely be used straight out of the box; rather, it is a comprehensive platform and tool kit to embed and automate digital signatures into your business process activities. It can deploy on-premises (still a pervasive requirement) or in a private, hybrid, or public cloud. It may well be used in conjunction with other Cygnet Infotech products such as AutomationWhiz, a more extensive RPA and automation product that includes the pre-built option to, for example, generate forms or letters.

Though we do not have firm dates, Cygnet Infotech does have a fairly extensive roadmap of new functionality that it plans to add to Cygnature, from e-stamp capabilities to integration with Salesforce.