Anvil Foundry is a company that has developed a platform, which enables paperwork automation with modern APIs and powerful no-code tools to collect data, generate PDFs, and gather signatures within any application. The company recently announced a $10 million series A round of funding. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed CEO and founder Mang-Git Ng.
Mang-Git Ng’s Background
Mang-Git Ng was born and raised in Michigan and grew up in a very supportive and academically focused community.
“Most of my adult role models were professors at Michigan State University or managers at GM,” said Ng. “It was only when I attended the University of Michigan and subsequently moved to California that I realized startups and tech could be a viable career path.”
Idea Behind Anvil
The idea for Anvil Foundry came together when Ng was applying for a mortgage and trying to shop for the best interest rate a couple of years ago.
“The process was tedious, I had to fill out a PDF for every bank and then submit the PDF over email. The most frustrating part was that 90% of the data was the same and lax attitude around email security,” Ng explained. “I wondered why this experience couldn’t be more like TurboTax and started thinking about a product that could allow anyone to turn a paperwork process into an online, TurboTax-like process.”
Core Products
Anvil is a company that provides a single and developer-friendly platform for building software that automates paperwork. The company’s no-code tools make it extremely easy for anyone to build web forms, generate documents, and request e-signatures while its flexible API means you can integrate Anvil deeply into your product.
Evolution Of Anvil’s Technology
How has Anvil Foundry’s technology evolved over time?
“Initially Anvil was just a no-code builder meant to help non-developers create online experiences to replace the traditional PDF+email+e-sign experience,” Ng noted. “Over time, we realized that a lot of tech companies want to build on top of the tools that Anvil has created, and we shifted our focus to making sure Anvil had a robust API and a top-notch developer experience. Since this pivot, Anvil has made it easy for developers to embed our Anvil Webforms, Etch e-sign, and Workflow products directly within their applications and style it with custom CSS. This allows developers building on the Anvil Platform to create a seamless experience that keeps users in their application, helping to maintain a consistent brand and user experience.”
Through an API-first focus, Anvil enables customers to build software in the structured-data world while Anvil handles the PDF-centric world. And Anvil maintains all data in a structured format so that it can be reused in downstream processes either through the API or through integrations via Zapier. This data-first approach enables Anvil to not only streamline paperwork but also tedious data-entry tasks.
Biggest Milestones
When I asked Ng about some of the company’s biggest milestones and he said that in 2020, Anvil helped thousands of small businesses apply for and receive PPP loans by powering the entire customer-facing application process for Sunrise Banks. And in early 2021, Anvil launched the PDF Filling API.
Since then, developers have generated or filled over 1.5 million PDFs with a single API request. And in late 2021, Anvil launched the completely redesigned Anvil Workflow Builder, hitting the top spot on Product Hunt.
In mid-2022, Anvil also branched into various verticals, powering paperwork automation for some of the top venture-backed startups including Carta, Vouch, and Job and Talent.
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Ng about some of the company’s most notable success stories, he pointed out that they continue to be impressed by the creative ways that their customers use Anvil. Ng acknowledged that it is hard to pick, but they are proud of the ways that Anvil is used in products to increase accessibility. But below are some examples:
— Long-time partners Seso Labor and Ganaz use Anvil to automate US government documentation for largely Spanish-speaking seasonal workers.
— The New Virginia Majority used Anvil to automate voter registration paperwork and register thousands of first-time voters for the 2020 election when traditional in-person get-out-the-vote efforts were stymied by pandemic restrictions.
— DollarFor is an Anvil customer that helps patients access hospital charity programs to lower their medical bills.
Funding
Anvil Foundry recently raised a Series A extension round from Craft Ventures and Gradient Ventures, bringing the total Series A funding to $10 million.
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
Anvil’s total addressable market is anywhere PDFs are used. And in the American market alone the TAM is north of $2 trillion when you consider how much worker productivity is consumed by data collection, document preparation, and data-entry. Currently, the company is focused on vertical SaaS companies working to build technology (read data-first) solutions to modernize legacy, often paper or PDF-bound, industries.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Anvil Foundry from the competition?
“Anvil has a vision of moving the world from paperwork to datawork,” Ng replied. “Our platform was built API-first and can scale to meet any type of paperwork needs. For non-coders, we offer powerful point-and-click tooling which allows them to be productive fast. We enable companies to build any experience that they want by providing them with the option to style any of our products with custom CSS or directly embedding them within their app.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Anvil’s future company goals?
“Anvil’s goal is to move the world from being paperwork centric to data-centric. In today’s world, business is conducted with paper / PDF documents, signatures and people-driven processes. This system was designed in a world before the existence of computers and the internet and is inherently incompatible with the way technology works today,” Ng concluded. “Modern businesses operate with a data-centric mindset. By working with structured data, they can easily transport data between computer systems, gain insights into their business with analytics, power decisions with software based decision engines. All of this means that business can be done faster, more efficiently with lower risk and lower operational overhead all while providing a much improved customer experience.”
Plus Anvil’s future is in creating the software infrastructure that enables business to transition from a paper and process centric world into a data and technology driven world. The company will do this by creating accessible no-code user interfaces for building webforms, configuring PDF templates and sending e-signatures while providing the most flexible and well-documented API for developers and builders to create digital experiences on top of Anvil’s building blocks.
