Nutrient is a company that delivers the building blocks to accelerate digital transformation for modern businesses. Nutrient’s SDKs, cloud-based document processing, low-code solutions for Microsoft 365, and workflow automation platform transform document ecosystems. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Nutrient CEO Jonathan Rhyne to learn more about the company.
Jonathan Rhyne’s Background
What is Jonathan Rhyne’s background? Rhyne said:
“I began my journey in technology as a child of the Internet age, working with computers since the first grade. My passion for PC gaming naturally sparked my interest in the internet and development. I started my undergraduate studies at NC State as a Computer Science major, but after a year and a half, I realized that coding behind a computer all day was not for me. I made a significant pivot to Political Science and History, a stark contrast to software development.”
“After completing my degree, I attended law school. Upon graduating in the summer of 2009, I faced the challenges of the financial crisis, which left law firms reluctant to hire. Around this time, the iOS SDK had just been released, and my older brother was actively participating in Mac and Indie Dev iOS conferences. In my search for opportunities, I asked him if any attorneys attended these events. Feeling desperate, I returned to Sears to sell appliances, doing the same job I had in high school, but now living with my mother despite holding two degrees and a law license.”
“Fortunately, I began speaking at these conferences, which allowed me to establish a small but growing practice focused on providing legal advice and business consulting to notable iOS developers, agencies, and businesses creating apps for the iPhone. This journey eventually led me to a conference in England, where I met my business partner. I subsequently left my law firm and co-founded Nutrient.”
Core Products
Please explain what Nutrient is and the company’s core products and features. Rhyne replied:
“Nutrient provides an unrivaled breadth of modern document tools that developers and IT professionals need to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. By building with Nutrient Software Development Kits (SDKs), product leaders and developers are able to create seamless, secure, and scalable document experiences. Whether building web, mobile, server, or cloud-based microservice applications, Nutrient SDKs help developers integrate document functionality — from viewing, signing, and form filling, to conversion, generation, authoring, and much more. We’ve recently released our AI Document Assistant to help businesses easily build in the ability to talk with their documents, summarize them, translate them, and even redact automatically with the use of a natural language interface.”
“Nutrient enables organizations to streamline document workflows and scale operations with off-the-shelf, low-code solutions and backend automation currently focused in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Many marketplaces out there that are geared toward document workflows lack the advanced document functionality so many companies require. Our low-code solutions easily integrate with these ecosystems like SharePoint, PowerAutomate and soon Salesforce to easily generate templated accessible documents and ensure your documents’ data is extractable, machine readable, and not locked away in inaccessible PDFs. We have tools that can do simple to complex document processing tasks like adding a watermark, converting Microsoft Office files to PDF, or merging two documents together. We have a built-in document viewer that is easily implemented in SharePoint to allow users to annotate, sign, fill out forms, and more without the document and its data leaving the security of your SharePoint Instance.”
With Nutrient’s Workflow Automation Platform, IT leaders and citizen developers can build structured, efficient, and auditable workflows for every department with a platform that’s easy to implement, use, and scale. Everything from tracking nuclear material to filling out a capital expenditure request to employee onboarding and more is all possible with Nutrient’s Workflow. The solution is used by some of the largest financial, governments, logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing businesses to help create visible, auditable, and fully automated workflows in their organization.
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Rhyne shared:
“The idea for the company started from trying to build a magazine reader on the iPhone and realizing there was no straightforward solution available at the time. Without an Apple-supported PDF SDK for iOS, developers had to independently create their own PDF parsers and renderers, a complex task to achieve commercial-grade quality. We initially focused on iOS, developing a PDF viewer that allowed users to view, annotate, fill out forms, and sign documents.”
“As demand grew from our B2B customers who were developing apps for both iOS and Android, we quickly expanded to the Android platform to provide a unified solution. Recognizing the shift towards web development over traditional desktop applications, we then created a client-side web framework that addressed similar challenges, incorporating a real-time syncing engine to enable collaborative reviewing, marking, and commenting on PDFs.”
Rebranding
What was the reasoning for the company rebranding, and why did you specifically choose ‘Nutrient’ (previously known as PSPDFKit)? Rhyne explained:
“After receiving strategic investment from global software investor Insight Partners in 2021, we acquired document processing technology from industry leaders ORPALIS, as well as low-code solutions from Aquaforest and Muhimbi, and the workflow automation platform Integrify.”
“Having fully integrated these companies for the past 3 years, we are now able to deliver a cohesive portfolio of solutions to mid-market and enterprise businesses that enhance, secure, and accelerate innovation throughout their entire organization’s document ecosystem. However, it was difficult for our current and prospective customers to understand what products and solutions we offered. Previously, we had 5 different websites, various branding, and customers mistaking us as resellers of the acquired companies. We knew it was past time for us to rebrand.”
“Since the company’s founding, we’ve watched technology grow at a breakneck pace of innovation. However, we noticed this wasn’t happening with digital documents. Documents have been and continue to be the foundational medium for exchanging and recording knowledge in business. Yet, it seems like documents are frozen in time, stuck handling the use cases from the 1990s and early 2000s — of printing and typewriting — creating a disaster of complexity. Without the necessary tools, this maze of complexity has been left to businesses and developers to navigate alone.”
“We started to wonder: What if this complexity could be made easier? What if developers had the tools to deliver seamless and secure document experiences everywhere they built apps? How much more productive and profitable would a business be with a modern workflow platform built with 21st century document technology? What would the world look like if we brought the same breakneck pace of innovation to documents?”
“And now we arrive at today. We’re all aligned on building the company that brings the lonely old forgotten document into the modern world. We know we stand on the shoulders of giants that brought us Word documents and PDFs. But we know there’s so much more that can be done. Here at Nutrient, we’re on a mission to evolve how humans experience and interact with documents.”
“Of course, everyone is wondering though, “Why Nutrient?” When renaming the company, I thought first about what our products bring to businesses and organizations, and second about how our products are used by the talented developers and builders we work with. All of our products are part of a document ecosystem or workflow of our customers. We integrate directly into their applications, workflows, or processes. We’re utilized to bring speed to development, or repair a broken process, or give a workflow some specific document functionality. So we’re foundational building blocks that developers and businesses use to enhance, protect, and repair their document ecosystems and workflows to ensure they’re healthy. While I was thinking about all these things, it started sounding a lot like what macronutrients do for a healthy body.”
“As you can see, choosing the name Nutrient was a deliberate decision. I loved the idea of using a word like Nutrient — one that everyone is familiar with — but making people think about the same familiar word in a different context: digital documents.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Rhyne noted:
“Nutrient first began as a bootstrapped company offering an iOS SDK for building a basic PDF viewer on the iPhone and later iPad. Over the years, we’ve expanded our offerings to include multiple different platform and developer language based SDKs, cloud-based document processing REST APIs, low-code solutions for M365, and most recently our B2B workflow automation platform.”
“In 2022, we acquired our first company, Muhimbi– a leading software solution provider for cloud and on-premises document management systems. This initial acquisition expanded our offerings into the low-code/no-code space, focusing on document process automation in Microsoft’s 365 ecosystem, and enabling anyone on their suite of platforms to build document workflows that automate manual business and complex technical document processes easily.”
“Shortly after, we acquired France-based ORPALIS Imaging Technologies and U.K.-based Aquaforest. ORPALIS had long been a leader in the Imaging Processing and Document Processing industry, building out one of the most feature rich and robust suite of SDKs made for the .NET framework called GdPicture. Aquaforest created holistic desktop document processing applications and server SDK solutions for the .NET and Microsoft ecosystem focused primarily around Data Extraction and OCR. The integration of these three companies into Nutrient enables us to leverage our platform’s capabilities alongside the diverse expertise of leading providers in the document viewing and processing space. This fusion allows us to offer unparalleled resources that empower developers and enterprises to innovate beyond traditional paper solutions.”
“Most recently, we acquired Integrify, a no-code process builder and workflow automation platform provider. This expanded our market from primarily developer-focused document products and solutions into the business process and workflow automation space. As a result, we are able to offer an unprecedented platform of product offerings to mid-market, enterprises, and government clients to enhance, improve, and consolidate all of their document needs to one vendor. Whether a business needs to create a highly customized document workflow for internal processes, enhance functionality within an existing product, integrate advanced document technology into a well-established platform, or digitize and optimize an entire internal business process, Nutrient provides the solutions to accomplish it all. We have set a new industry standard for document processing with our unique single-vendor approach that addresses all of an organization’s document needs. However, we are committed to ongoing innovation, driven by our mission and the needs of our customers. This includes integrating generative AI capabilities through our AI Document Assistant and seamlessly merging the authoring and reviewing processes with our Document Authoring SDK.”
“Having fully integrated the acquired companies, we are now able to deliver a cohesive portfolio of solutions that enhance, secure, and accelerate innovation in any organization’s document ecosystem.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Rhyne and the team faced in building the company? Rhyne acknowledged:
“As Nutrient grew, particularly when we reached around 50 employees, I encountered a dilemma that many founders face: the pressure to transition into “manager mode.” The advice was clear — hire professional managers, delegate responsibilities, and step back. But I quickly realized that while this approach allowed us to scale, it also introduced bureaucracy and slowed down decision-making. For a time, I followed the conventional wisdom, but the results were frustrating. Our growth stagnated, and strategic decisions felt disconnected from the core values and vision that had driven our early success. Politics started creeping in, and it felt like the focus shifted from results to how things were being done. This frustration led me to return to founder mode, and it was a game-changing decision. We started moving faster, and our profitability and growth improved significantly.”
“One of the key advantages of staying in founder mode is the ability to maintain an ambitious vision and execute it relentlessly. Our triple revenue growth, along with recent product releases, such as AI Document Assistant, and our acquisition and integration of complementary companies are testaments to that. By staying in touch at the ground level, I ensure that every new product offering, feature, or acquisition aligns with and brings us closer to our long-term mission.”
“I focus on execution risk in the rapid growth scale-up phase as it’s the hardest challenge to conquer successfully in this phase.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Rhyne about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Nutrient’s document technology is used by thousands of businesses across 80 nations, including more than 15 percent of Global 500 brands and more than 130 public sector organizations in 24 countries.”
“One notable customer story includes Box, an intelligent content cloud with secure collaboration, content management, and workflow options for businesses. Content is the most valuable asset for Box’s customers, making accessing that content seamlessly a top priority. Box needed a PDF SDK with strong security foundations that was scalable, maintainable, and reliable to quickly add advanced features to its platform and provide exceptional user experience. With Nutrient’s SDK, Box was able to provide enhanced customer-requestend features and user experience improvements such as editing and high-fidelity rendering while also shortening development time. This allowed Box to provide its customers with a smooth and reliable experience when previewing or collaborating on their documents. Throughout the partnership, we provided continuous assistance and collaborated with Box developers on requesting updates or new features. Our solutions played a pivotal role in addressing the Box’s challenges by providing a reliable and cost-effective environment. The seamless integration, robust support, ease of testing, and comprehensive documentation collectively contributed to an enhanced development workflow and an improved customer experience.”
“We also have a long list of customer stories available here – https://www.nutrient.io/blog/categories/customer-stories/”
Enhancing Product Offerings
How do you ensure the company continuously innovates and enhances its product offerings? Rhyne pointed out:
“The biggest way I ensure Nutrient is fostering innovation is first by empowering and demanding that everyone at every position in the company be responsible for the results of the company. That means every single person is expected to have influence, make an impact, and be the keeper of the company culture. I feel one of the largest drawbacks to innovation while scaling is process and bureaucracy. There’s a tendency to feel like as companies get larger, decisions need more people to make them, regardless of their impact or ability to reverse them with limited to no impact. I feel like this is mainly an issue with specialization that happens as you hire more people to focus on singular things. A project or initiative goes from requiring 1 person at the beginning of a startup, to 3 people aligned to the same goal, to 5 people from 3 departments that may not be aligned, to 15 people from 5 departments, all with differing opinions and stakes in the outcome, making alignment practically impossible. I would always rather work in a company of owners.”
Key Benefits
What are the key benefits of your technology, and how does this differentiate you from competitors? Rhyne affirmed:
“We provide an unrivaled breadth of modern document tools that developers, product leaders, and IT administrators need to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. We separated our product offerings into three major categories: software development kits (SDKs), low-code integrations, and our workflow automation platform.”
“By building with our SDKs, product leaders and developers are able to create seamless, secure, and scalable document experiences helping them quickly get to market faster and less costly than if they were building from scratch or on-top of open-source solutions. Whether building web, mobile, server, or cloud-based microservice applications, our SDKs help developers integrate document functionality — from viewing, signing, and form filling, to conversion, generation, generative AI, authoring, and much more. The extensive functionality we offer, particularly in advanced document technology, is quite rare in our industry, which is why there are so few competitors in the SDK space. We are currently the only vendor providing AI-assisted solutions in this area, including a document viewer equipped with a natural language interface that allows users to query large custom document sets and extract information in a format of their choosing.”
“Our low-code integrations and backend automation technology for Microsoft 365 empower organizations to streamline document workflows and scale operations securely, all while keeping their data within the M365 environment. This sets us apart from competitors, as they typically require transferring documents and data to their proprietary cloud solutions for processing. We are recognized as the leading provider of on-premises solutions in this domain, while also offering seamlessly integrated options for cloud customers.”
“With our workflow automation platform, IT administrators and citizen developers can build structured, efficient, and auditable workflows and processes for every department with a powerful platform that’s easy to implement, use, and scale — no matter the process or workflow. We have comprehensive experience and a successful track record working with some of the largest enterprises and government agencies. Our professional services team offers unprecedented customization, ease of setup, and training of staff so that you can operationalize the platform easily to drive efficiencies across all departments.”
“We stand out from most vendors by offering a comprehensive range of document solutions across various product lines. Our commitment to being an innovative partner, rather than merely addressing the current needs of the document landscape, is a key reason why clients choose us. We frequently collaborate with forward-thinking startups, businesses, and agencies, in contrast to those that cling to outdated practices and seek only transactional relationships.”
“Moreover, our approach to business—how we structure our partnerships and licensing agreements, manage feature requests, and develop our products—along with our exceptional customer support, is what truly differentiates us in the market. We genuinely enjoy working with our customers and view our relationships as partnerships, which is evident in our everyday interactions.”
Future Goals
How do you see Nutrient continuing to grow, and what are your goals for the company? Rhyne concluded:
“We truly believe this message and are passionate about seeing this through.”
“We’re all aligned on building a company that brings the lonely, old, and forgotten document into the modern world. We know we stand on the shoulders of giants that brought us Word documents and PDFs. But we know there’s so much more that can be done. Here at Nutrient, we’re on a mission to evolve how humans experience and interact with documents.”
“We’ve all dealt with the struggles of documents in today’s world and wonder, aren’t we in the 21st century? If you don’t understand the technical mess that is the digital document space, it honestly makes no sense why documents haven’t been innovated past just the basic one for one equivalent to paper. It’s time for a company to rise up and state the problem explicitly and commit to getting to work on solving it. That’s what we are doing at Nutrient.”
“Since COVID woke up the world to the need of digital workflows to support hybrid and remote work, our market has rapidly grown. Companies went from having digital transformation on their perpetual 5 year roadmap to needing it yesterday. I believe we have a very compelling strategy and platform of offerings for companies looking for a truly innovative partner that can help them bridge that gap across all their potential document needs.”
“We are already seeing the market validate our approach with our tremendous growth over the past 3 years. I believe we are poised with this rebrand to accelerate our growth even more than it has over the past 3 years. I look forward to continuing to partner with the most innovative companies and organizations across the world to accomplish our mission and be the company that is remembered for bringing documents back to the future.”
