We live in an era when spacecrafts can independently land on Earth and self-driving cars are beginning to populate our roads. It seems we are automating every aspect of our lives. Yet when you peek into the back-office of just about any company, you’ll see tired people slaving over incredible amounts of tedious work. Millions of people around the world sift through mountains of documents only to transcribe the numbers they contain into spreadsheets. Makes little sense, right? Welcome Rossum.
Rossum is teaching computers how to read data from common documents, just as Tesla is teaching cars how to drive on established roads. The goal is to free people from spreadsheets and move them towards more creative activities.
Most software that extracts data separates the structure of a document from its content. Rossum is
different, because it “sees” document semantics and structure the same way that humans do. That’s the key to our innovation, making it possible for Rossum’s neural networks to read even semi-structured data with unbeatable precision.
Today Rossum announced that it has raised $4.5 million since its inception — including $1 million in preseed funding to develop a minimal viable product between 2017 and 2018 and a $3 million seed round that closed last month. The funding round was co-led by U.K.-based seedinvestors LocalGlobe and Seedcamp, with participation from some notable angel investors, including Flexport CEO and founder Ryan Petersen, and Elad Gil, who sold his startup Mixer Labs to Twitter in 2009 before becoming an investor in Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, Square, and Stripe, among others.