David Špinar
Rossum Ltd., founded by three highly regarded experts on artificial intelligence (AI) from the Czech Technical University in Prague, has officially joined forces with the investment group Miton. In addition to financing, we are investing our experience with building technology firms, and we plan to play an active role in joint AI projects. Over the past few months, Rossum has been working on automatic reading of documents, which could save countless hours of administrative work for millions of people around the world. At the moment they are teaching computers how to read invoices, more than a billion of which are created in the world each day. Rossum’s ambition is to be the best in the world at retrieving and processing invoice data.
“We feel that Miton is an ideal partner for Rossum. In addition to investing, they are also actively involved in product co-creation. Their history shows that this approach is particularly beneficial to the companies in which they invest, and we believe that it will help us too,” says Rossum’s Tomáš Gogár. “This is a new experience for our team, which is heavily tech oriented,” adds Gogár’s colleague Petr Baudiš. “We believe that Miton will help advance our entry into the field of artificial intelligence.”
Miton owns a third of the recently founded Rossum. The founders are the majority owners. Another investment partner is Startup Yard, which helped launch Rossum’s business idea and first announced their joint partnership at Startup Yard’s Demo Day event on 22 February 2017.
The Rossum team includes Petr Baudiš, who three years ago began to work on a project that became the best open-source software in the world for answering questions. It also has Tomáš Gogár, who received an award from IBM for the best Czech mobile application, and Tomáš Tunys, who has collaborated with Microsoft Research. On behalf of Miton, the project will benefit from active involvement of Ondřej Raška, who over the past few years has been working on business opportunities in the field of deep learning.
“Our partnership with Rossum presents a unique opportunity. Rossum brings together a top-level team and the market potential is enormous. What's more, it’s all happening at the right time, when the technology of deep neural networks is rewriting established fields,” states Ondřej, Miton’s founding partner.
Together the two partners are researching practical applications of deep neural networks in retrieving information from documents created by humans. These could include scientific papers, web pages or any other documents.
About Rossum
Rossum is a startup company developing technology based on artificial intelligence that enables computers to read documents in a similar way as the human mind. This unique technology makes it possible for computers to better understand the structure and semantics of an entire document. Thanks to Rossum’s technology, computers will be better at helping people with everyday tasks in the office and on the internet.
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