Rossum raises $4.5M to make OCR-like data entry many times more accurate

Every day, people slog over inputting date from invoices and other forms. So instead of using traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extraction software, you could apply a new form of machine learning to documents to speed up the process. That’s the thinking behind Rossum’s technology, which uses ‘Cognitive Data Capture’ to teach computers to understand documents in the way humans do. It says its AI tool has been proven to extract data six times faster than at a human rate while saving companies up to 80% of the costs.

The company has now secured $4.5 million after one $1million pre-seed with Miton and StartupYard, followed by a second $3.5 million seed round, led by LocalGlobe out of London. Seedcamp also participated.

A number of Angels also took part: Elad Gil (Twitter’s former VP of strategy and investor in Airbnb, Square, and Pinterest); Michael Stoppelman (investor in Wish, Lyft and the former SVP of Engineering at Yelp); Vijay Pandurangan (investor and advisor for Wish and Get Room and former Director of Engineering at Twitter); and Ryan Petersen (founder and CEO Flexport and Import Genius).

Rossum’s software was built by its three founders, former AI PhD students Tomas Gogar, Petr Baudis and Tomas Tunys. Baudis’ work is credited in Google’s scientific paper on its historic AlphaGo AI victory in 2016.

Rather than replacing employees, Rossum’s aim is to speed up human operators, giving businesses more flexibility and reliability for their customers, and helping employees focus their attention on more complex tasks or tasks that require creativity. Rossum says its accuracy rates average at around 95% and for any data fields Rossum’s software can’t identify, it asks for feedback from a human worker. Each time it receives feedback, the software learns, improves and this accuracy increases.

Rossum’s product is already used by companies in every continent, including multiple Fortune 500 enterprises, such as Siemens.

Rossum’s current system is helping its clients chiefly process invoices and similar documents, like delivery notes. However, the technology can be used to process documents across many segments including accounting, logistics, insurance, real estate management, among others. It plans to use its investments to further develop this technology for multiple sectors, open a US office and continue its global expansion.

Rossum’s co-founder Tomas Gogar said: “Technology should make data entry easier and cheaper but businesses have become too reliant on using old systems that no longer meet their needs. Rossum solves these problems without complicated, clunky integrations; without teams of developers; and without high costs. ”

Reshma Sohoni from SeedCamp said: “Rossum’s technology is a game-changer for business. We’re excited to work with such a passionate and highly skilled team to bring the cost and time savings of its AI data-extraction tool to even more businesses.”