Docsumo Is Here To Help Enterprises Get 10x Efficient At Document Understanding

For financial services, quick and efficient decision-making is often the difference between a successful customer acquisition and a failed one. To make fast and accurate decisions, enterprises need to capture and analyze unstructured data from documents such as tax returns, financial statements, and invoices. 

When Bikram and I started speaking with lenders, insurers, and other fintech companies in January 2019, one thing was clear—access to accurate data and analytics was only possible with a large operations team manually reading customer documents. 

We realized that data capture was complex and painful, so we decided to build an API platform for enterprises to easily automate manual, error-prone processes. 

We are now at the cusp of a technological shift where machines are more powerful at reading & analyzing documents than humans and the enterprise stack is incomplete without a powerful Document AI engine. 

As another milestone in this journey, we are glad to announce that Docsumo raised $ 3.5 million in Document AI seed funding capital. Common Ocean led the round with participation from Fifth Wall, Arbor Realty Trust & existing investor Better Capital. The amount will be used to improve further & expand Docsumo’s API products and our team.

It wasn’t an easy road.

Document understanding is difficult—unintelligent and template-based OCR solutions don’t cut it. My co-founder Bikram used to be a data entry agent in Nepal to earn a side income and knew how tedious data entry is. 

However, the problem is much more complicated to automate since humans can make sense of unstructured images, whereas machines need structured data for decisions. 

Before writing the first lines of code, we spoke to dozens of CTOs, heads of operations & underwriters to help us understand their day-to-day challenges. Additionally, it was important to understand how simplifying document processing would help businesses. 

We knew the challenges, so we started small with just one use-case invoice and launched the product in mid-2019. 

The response was very positive.

We converted our first enterprise customer, PayU, in October 2019. Since then, we have grown 6x in the last year and expanded our offerings to multiple use cases in the US commercial lending & insurance space. Here is a short demo of the product:

‍End-to-end workflow automation

We came across a few recurring themes while working with initial customers:

• Customers want a solution that adapts to their needs.
• They want to automate end-to-end rather than assemble different tools.
• They want analytics & validation logic to enable real-time decisions. 

To this end, we have built Docsumo such that: 

• Customers can train a machine learning model on their data set.
• Embed a human-in-the-loop review tool in their existing workflow
• Write simple Excel-like validation checks for improved accuracy
• Categorize transaction data to get rich attributes for decisions 

The advantage of this approach is that Docsumo can now process millions of documents per year for large enterprises while being flexible enough for developers to automate processes easily. 

Backed by incredible investors (our customers)

It’s uncommon to hear from customers who like your product so much that they’re willing to invest in you. In this round, we witnessed two of our customers, Arbor and National Debt Relief, invest. This is a testament to the product we build in the cognitive automation space. We also witnessed additional participation from Fifth Wall and our previous investor, Better Capital. 

In the spirit of sharing our learnings, here is the pitch deck we used for this round:

Looking forward - #1 Intelligent Document Processing Software 

The trust of our clients and investors is overwhelming, and it gives us confidence to pursue our mission of enabling automated enterprises. We take this opportunity to celebrate this OCR solution seed funding milestone together and are grateful for the support.

Amongst countless milestones we want to achieve, the least distant ones are expanding our client base, building more use-case APIs, and hiring a bunch of rockstars to help us in our mission.