New Energy Nexus uses Adobe Acrobat to empower innovators building a greener world

New Energy Nexus is the world's leading ecosystem of funds and accelerators supporting diverse clean energy entrepreneurs, from emerging tech through to clean energy deployment and adoption. Through its “Theory of Change” initiative, the company aims to help the next generation of innovators set down roots in the clean energy economy. With the goal of growing 100,000 start-ups toward success by 2030, their 100-person team has a lot of work ahead of them — which until recently, included a lot of paperwork.

Building a more sustainable world with every transaction

Every day, a small team based in Singapore, handles complex forms ranging from contracts and other legal documents to purchase orders and invoices to support initiatives across Asia Pacific. Not only do they have to swiftly process large volumes of PDFs to financially fuel these clean-energy innovators, but they also have to protect sensitive legal information as they send documents for signature. In the past, New Energy Nexus used multiple software programs to view, print, sign, share, and annotate PDFs. Though these solutions were free, they were error-prone and came with fewer features, requiring team members to move between tools — making the process less secure.

“Sustainability is the foundation of everything we do, from the innovators we support to the way we approach our work. When searching for a better way to work with PDFs, we absolutely needed an application with the flexibility to perform detail-oriented tasks, while protecting confidential information,” says Edmund Lee, finance manager. “Only Adobe Acrobat came with the balance of speed, efficiency, and security essential to becoming our long-term, universal resource.”

Preserving security while powering up a standardized, efficient workflow

The adoption of Adobe Acrobat gives the New Energy Nexus team a go-to application to accelerate projects to go green. Whether they’re pulling together Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Dropbox files, team members can use Adobe Acrobat to combine multiple files and formats into one PDF. It’s as easy as saving, then selecting the right forms, before pressing combine.

Knowing that Adobe is a global digital document leader, the team can standardize PDF workflows with the confidence that every PDF they send or receive will be accessible, compliant, and secure. “Having Adobe Acrobat as our universal application saves us so much time, because we can accomplish everything related to PDFs in one application. We have the confidence that forms we receive from a variety of vendors, companies, and stakeholders will be readable and compatible with our system,” says Lee. “We can just open a form, fill it in, and sign it before sending it on. Given how urgent the nature of the work we support can be, moving quickly is important to us.”

With Adobe Acrobat, team members enjoy greater control over how they order or even delete individual pages. As confidential legal documents cross their desks, the page delete function has become a time-saver for the team. If the sensitive information is more granular, team members can select the relevant text or image in a PDF, and, with one right-click, choose the Redact function. To avoid the manual tasks of making redactions across multiple pages, team members can simply choose to repeat the redaction across all pages.

A clean, quick e-signature workflow

To support complicated projects — like helping farms convert waste to hydrogen and valuable carbons or running ideation bootcamps for engineers, developers, designers, and other engineers — the New Energy Nexus team needed to streamline anything related to finance and administration.

Smoother document and e-signature workflows in Adobe Acrobat enable teams to quickly review and edit key documents from anywhere, even mobile devices, before sending those forms on for approval or signature. With an easy to navigate interface, team members can read and sign documents on mobile devices without pinching or zooming.

Faster e-signatures through Adobe Acrobat have also helped the team get green entrepreneurs the financial resources they need as soon as possible. Not only does Adobe Acrobat guide users to every spot they need to sign, but New Energy Nexus teams also regularly use the signature validation feature to maintain their high standards of security.

“Using Adobe Acrobat empowers us to work as effectively and securely as possible,” says Lee. “With the faster, easier processes we’ve refined through Adobe Acrobat, we’re growing our innovators and entrepreneurs to create a cleaner, healthier world.”

New Energy Nexus uses Adobe Acrobat to work efficiently and more securely in PDFs. Learn More about Acrobat Pro.