- Rossum, a Cognitive Data Capture company, announced it raised $4.5 million in seed funding
A lot of time gets wasted by manually inputting data from forms. In fact, every day throughout the world, an estimated equivalent of 100 human lifetimes are spent on manual data entry.
Rossum aims to solve this problem by applying machine learning to help increase productivity. Rossum utilizes ‘Cognitive Data Capture’ to teach computers to understand documents in the way humans do. And Rossum announced it raised $4.5 million in a seed round of funding from LocalGlobe with participation from Seedcamp, Miton, and StartupYard followed by a second $3.5 million seed round led by LocalGlobe and participation from Seedcamp.
A group of private investors also joined this round, including Twitter’s former VP of Strategy Elad Gil, former SVP of Engineering at Yelp Michael Stoppelman, former Director of Engineering at Twitter Vijay Pandurangan, founder and CEO of Flexport and Import Genius Ryan Petersen.
And Rossum told TechCrunch that its artificial intelligence tool has been proven to extract six times faster than a human rate while also saving companies up to 80% of the costs.
“When we first started using Rossum’s technology, we couldn’t believe how accurate it was,” said Martin Nedopil, a Siemens Data Capture Expert. “It was so impressive, we were convinced its results were being backed up by manual labour when they weren’t. It was almost too good to be true.”
Rossum — which was was built by former AI PhD students Tomas Gogar, Petr Baudis, and Tomas Tunys — said that the company was not built to replace employees. The company has a goal to provide human operators with a tool that helps them create more value.
“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. Our solution is smart enough to be tailored to suit any type of business and it’s scalable to work with even the largest of firms,” explained Rossum CEO and co-founder Tomas Gogar.
