We’re already into the first week of July, which means that more than half of 2024 has already flown by. This means that instead of our usual IDP News Weekly Recap (and as we did last summer), it’s time to take a look at what’s happened in the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) space in the first six months of 2024.
Let’s jump right in:
The rebranding of a big name in the industry, new partnerships and a pre-seed funding round kick off the new year:
The year 2024 started with a bang: after Intelligent Document Processing vendor Altilia joined forces with Gardant to harness the potential of LLMs in transforming documents into business knowledge, and JPMorgan Chase’s research team announced that it had developed its own LLM called DocLLM, which focuses on understanding documents, Kofax announced its rebranding as Tungsten Automation. Reynolds Bish, Tungsten Automation’s CEO explained the rebranding: “Choosing Tungsten Automation as our new name means embracing a promise of enduring reliability, innovations recognized by leading industry analysts, and a commitment to success in the dynamic world of intelligent automation. With a broad portfolio of solutions dedicated to solving inefficiencies across a wide parameter of use cases in the financial, healthcare, supply chain and government industries amongst others.” Meanwhile, the relatively young IDP vendor Send AI (founded in 2021 as Autopilot) secured a pre-seed funding of €2.2M led by Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) and venture capital firm Keen Venture Partners. With the new funding, Send AI intended to strengthen its team, accelerate the development of its internal AI models and prepare for expansion into international markets. At the end of the first month of the year, Rossum received non-dilutive funding from CIBC Innovation Banking to further expand its market position.
Curious about what keeps experts, CEOs and other decision-makers in the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) space on their toes? To this end, we launched the Opinions section in January. Get food for thought on IDP-related topics from the industry’s leading minds. Discover all opinion pieces.
In February, no less than three acquisitions are reported in the IDP space, more partnerships are formed, platform releases are announced and one vendor reports a significant increase in new ARR for its IDP platform:
In early February, Eigen Technologies announced the availability of its IDP platform on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, giving Microsoft Azure customers a streamlined solution for automating their data extraction workflows. A few day later, Belgian Intelligent Document Processing vendor Metamaze announced that it has been acquired by Duco, a SaaS provider of AI-powered data automation. Niels Van Weereld, CEO at Metamaze, commented: “We started Metamaze to tackle the huge and growing ‘unstructured data problem’. Most IDP platforms are limited by preset models, common document types, and fixed sets of fields. We’ve built Metamaze as an AI-powered self-learning intelligence platform that reads and interprets any document to extract information and data by itself. Embedding our tech into a complementary data automation suite, while scaling globally is our primary goal. We are very excited to join forces with Duco, who share our automation vision, and to grow Metamaze as a core part of Duco’s strategy.” Meanwhile, ScaleHub announced the appointment of Mike Riegel as new CEO. The experienced executive planned to focus ScaleHub’s efforts on further accelerating the company’s growth and partner network in the European Union, the United States, Australia and the Middle East. TCG Process announced a partnership with DecisionRules, a no-code/low-code platform focused on business rules creation and management, to jointly improve agility in IDP, and Alkymi announced a strategic partnership with Lionpoint Group to provide an unparalleled combination of strategic services and advanced technology to its clients in the financial services industry. IDP vendor KnowledgeLake released Lake Aurora with a range of new features that enable organizations to rapidly scale operations, and GenAI company Deep Cognition unveiled its “training-free” IDP solution. Meanwhile, ABBYY announced a 60% increase in new annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2023 for its IDP solution, driven by organizations that wanted to LLMs for business applications and needed ABBYY’s purpose-built AI to transform their enterprise data and feed the models with relevant information. A few days later, BP3 announced the acquisition of darwinLabs to cover the full spectrum of end-to-end business process transformation while expanding its geographic reach, and UST announced the acquisition of Leonardo to further strengthen its position in the Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) market. Three new platform releases from IDP vendors at the end of February: Rossum launched Rossum Aurora with its proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) specifically trained on transactional business documents (hence the name Transactional Large Language Model, T-LLM). With this approach, Rossum Aurora wanted to eliminate the hallucinations that often occur with third-party LLMs. And following its rebranding, Tungsten Automation launched TotalAgility 8, the latest version of its flagship platform, which includes generative AI-powered copilots, a repository of out-of-the-box extraction models and enhancements for citizen developers. Last but not least, Planet AI launched IDA 5.2, the latest version of its Intelligent Document Analysis software suite, which introduced several new features, including zero-shot data extraction based on LLMs. At the end of February, HuLoop Automation closed its $5M seed round led by Moneta Ventures and with participation from Rebellion Ventures, Growth Factory, Vibranium VC, Nurture Ventures, Insta VC and others.
March brings new partnerships, record fourth quarter result by an IDP provider, a $29M Series B funding round, and platform launches:
ABBYY expanded its partnership with Novelis to bring the success Novelis has achieved in supporting its customers’ intelligent automation initiatives in Europe to the United States. SER formed a strategic partnership with BARQ Systems to expand its presence in the MEA region, Parashift partnered with Adeon to further increase the efficiency and accuracy of Adeon’s document DMS by integrating Parashift’s IDP platform, and DOConvert partnered with Varisource to help organizations manage and leverage technology services and realize savings. Meanwhile, Automation Anywhere announced record fourth quarter results, with 50% growth compared to the third quarter and a 14% year-over-year increase in large deals. Success also for another IDP provider: Nanonets raised $29 million in a Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Accel, with participation from existing investors Elevation and Y Combinator. Nanonets intended to use the new funding to further invest in improving its algorithms, particularly those that process unstructured data, and launch new products based on them. Elsewhere, Mindee launched docTI, its new AI-powered document processing tool which enables the processing of any document type in any language without the need for data model training. In late March, SER announced that private equity firm TA Associates had made a strategic growth investment in the company, and Hyperscience announced the latest version of Hyperscience Hypercell, its turnkey AI infrastructure software platform.
April brings awards, certifications, appointments, acquisitions, partnerships and new funding rounds:
In the beginning of April, UiPath appointed Sebastian Schrötel as new Senior Vice President of Product Management, and Datamatics appointed Dinesh Kumar VK as new Executive Vice President and Global Sales Head lead the company’s global sales function and further strengthen its position as a leader in digital solutions. A week earlier, Datamatics announced the acquisition of Dextara Digital to expand its capabilities in the Salesforce ecosystem. Research firm Everest Group published its latest Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Products PEAK Matrix® 2024 Assessment. In addition to its usual overall IDP market report, this year Everest Group also evaluated 10 leading banking-specific IDP providers and 10 leading insurance-specific IDP providers and positioned them in the respective Matrix. As a “Star Performer” in Everest Group’s IDP Matrix, Rossum announced its certified integration with Coupa, a provider of an AI-driven Business Spend Management platform, making Rossum available in the Coupa App Marketplace. Elsewhere, Parashift joined forces with Bolten IT Solutions to enhance document processing in the healthcare sector, and ProcessMaker acquired Process Intelligence company Workfellow. IDP vendor Ripcord closed $32 million in new funding led by existing investors including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Icon Ventures, Lux Capital, and MUIP with additional support from FUJIFILM Business Innovation, Ripcord’s joint venture partner in Japan. Sam Fahmy, CEO at Ripcord, commented: “Supersonic advancements in robotics and AI are fundamentally changing how we interact with and gain knowledge from documents. Ripcord is committed to leading the way in this new era and is incredibly grateful for our investors, customers, and partners for helping fuel our mission.” Another IDP vendor secured funding: Staple raised $4 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Wavemaker Partners and underscored Staple’s commitment to transforming the landscape of document processing through advanced AI. Ben Stein, CEO and Co-founder of Staple, commented: “This funding is not just a financial boost but a vote of confidence in our vision to revolutionise document processing across the globe. Our aim is to not only expand our market presence but also to continue innovating, making our solutions even more accessible and efficient for businesses worldwide. We are focused on breaking down language barriers and simplifying complex document processing tasks. With this funding, we’re setting our sights on broadening our impact, particularly in regions rich in linguistic diversity and complexity such as Southeast Asia.” Elsewhere, German IDP provider natif.ai has been acquired by DocuWare. UiPath announced the launch of two new data centers in India as part of its global expansion initiative. At the end of the month, Planet AI announced the expansion of its AI presence in Rostock, Germany, together with IT provider and majority owner of the company Bechtle, to establish Bechtle’s central AI innovations hub there.
More acquisitions, more partnerships, more appointments in May – and a surprising resignation:
IDP vendor Instabase announced a partnership with management consulting firm Burnie Group to enable their customers to achieve better insights and increased efficiency when processing complex, unstructured data sets across various industries. Analyst firm Deep Analysis published new Vendor Vignettes, including early-stage IDP provider Reshape AI. Celaton announced its acquisition by software solutions provider AdvancedAdvT (ADVT), which had agreed to acquire the IDP vendor for cash consideration of £5.0 million net of cash acquired of £1.5 million (cash as at April 30, 2024). Jim Chase, Executive Chairman at Celaton, commented on the acquisition: “Celaton naturally aligns with ADVT’s focus of empowering customers by streamlining complexities, automating repetitive tasks, and ultimately enhancing productivity, compliance, and engagement.” He continued: “This transaction is a great opportunity for our customers and our team alike. We will have access to more investment as well as a larger pool of digital transformation expertise across the wider group.” Meanwhile, ABBYY revamped its Marketplace which consists of an extensive library of AI document capabilities that simplifies deployment, meets the growing demand from organizations for the high-quality data required to effectively leverage LLMs, and also supports the use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems with its IDP platform. A few days later, ABBYY announced the appointment of Clayton C. Peddy as Chief Information Security Officer to lead the company’s InfoSec initiatives. Elsewhere, Cortical.io announced a strategic partnership with global reinsurance leader Swiss Re to offer its IDP solution to Swiss Re’s clients to help them automate labor-intensive insurance processes like intake, submission and quoting. At the end of May, two analyst firms published their latest reports: Infosource published its 2024 Global Capture & IDP Software Vendor Matrix, which evaluated and ranked 23 software vendors based on eleven criteria and divided them into two categories, and IDC published its MarketScape: Worldwide Unstructured Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, which evaluated 16 vendors based on their ability to process unstructured documents. A surprising resignation occurred at the end May when UiPath announced that Rob Enslin has resigned as CEO and member of the UiPath Board of Directors, effective June 1, 2024, and Daniel Dines, founder and former CEO of UiPath, has reassumed the role of CEO, also effective June 1, 2024.
In June, we launched the Intelligent Document Processing Vendor Directory to provide a centralized, easy-to-filter repository for anyone looking for innovative IDP solutions.
Another acquisition and another funding round in June, a granted patent, and three IDP vendors honored with AI Breakthrough Awards:
In early June, Hyperscience unveiled Hypercell for GenAI, which automatically annotates, labels, and structures data from documents for fine-tuning LLMs and GenAI experiences. IDP vendor Eigen Technologies announced that it has been acquired by contract lifecycle management (CLM) leader Sirion. Dr Lewis Z. Liu, Founder and CEO of Eigen Technologies, explained: “Unstructured data, specifically billions of documents and contracts that sit in enterprises, is one of the biggest problems that face businesses today. By combining Eigen’s best in class Document AI and AI governance with Sirion’s category leading CLM and document workflow capabilities, we are creating an unstoppable natural leader in the contract and document AI world. At Eigen, we pioneered large scale data extraction for complex documents and created the world’s most trusted Document AI engine. Our engineers and data scientists are some of the best in the world in bringing AI into production for large enterprises. Eigen, when integrated with Sirion’s platform, will change the enterprise data landscape as we know it, for the better. I’m excited to be joining Ajay on the Sirion journey and deeply believe we will solve the unstructured data problem when no one else has.” Elsewhere, IDP vendor Indico Data closed a $19 million funding round led by .406 ventures and joined by Guidewire, the P&C platform for insurers, as well as existing investors Sandbox Industries, Osage Venture Partners, and Jump Capital. Base64.ai announced the appointments of Matt Mallette as Chief Revenue Officer, Mike Chasteen as Senior Vice President of Sales and Chris Maertz as Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem, sending a clear indication of the company’s growth trajectory. Two IDP vendors launched new platform releases: With the Opal release, Kanverse.ai combined its patented multi-stage Al engine with the latest LLMs to cover a wide range and complexity of unstructured, semi-structured and structured documents. Klippa announced a new release for DocHorizon, that included out-of-the-box models for identity documents, salary slips and bank statements. Datamatics ended the first six months of the year with two major announcements: The company’s proprietary IDP solution TruCap+ was recently granted the patent “System and Method of Automated Document Processing for Structured, Semi-Structured and Unstructured Documents”, and Datamatics became one of the first companies in the world to receive ISO 42001:2023 certification for Artificial Intelligence Management Systems (AIMS). Last but not least, ABBYY won “Best IDP Solution”, Mindee won “Best Handwriting Recognition Solution”, and Evolution AI won “Best Machine Learning Company” in the 2024 AI Breakthrough Awards.
Thanks for reading and I hope you’re as excited about the second half of the year in the Intelligent Document Processing space as we are! See you next week (back with our usual IDP News Weekly Recap).
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