As 2022 is coming to a close, instead of our usual (and much shorter) recap of the week’s IDP news, we’re taking one more look back at the past 12 months in the Intelligent Document Processing space. In terms of acquisitions, funding and partnerships, we’ve seen some exciting things!
Series B and platform launches:
In March, JIFFY.ai raised $53 million in Series B funding. The investment round was led by Eight Roads Ventures, a leading global investment firm backed by Fidelity, which included participation from venture firms Iron Pillar, R-Squared, and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Reaction and Rebright Partners.
Kanverse.ai announced its partnership with UiPath to bring zero-touch document processing to UiPath customers. ABBYY appointed Scott Opitz as its new chief technology and product officer to accelerate its innovation in intelligent automation, while Acodis launched its new IDP platform, combining years of research. Indico Data then released Indico 5, with five new features of its unstructured data platform.
Big news:
Big news came twice from Laiye in April: the intelligent automation provider reported the acquisition of Mindsay, a leading European enterprise chatbot and voicebot platform, as well as the completion of its $160 million Series C funding round. The latest tranche totaled $70 million and was led by private equity firms, including lead investor HOPU Magnolia, and co-leads Youshan Capital and VMS Group. Guanchun Wang, Chairman and CEO of Laiye commented: “This new round of funding will continue to fuel our relentless product innovation and triple-digit YoY revenue growth in the years to come.”
Meanwhile, OpenBots raised $15 million in growth capital. The investment came from the same group of private investors that had already invested in the seed round.
Fundings and acquisitions in summer:
In June, no-code workflow automation company airSlate received $51.5 million in a round of funding. Venture capital firm G Squared led the capital round with participation from UiPath. This made airSlate the first portfolio company for UiPath’s newly formed arm, UiPath Ventures. airSlate later disclosed the acquisition of DocHub.
Kofax acquired Tungsten to provide more comprehensive invoice processing and automation solutions to its customers. Meanwhile Parascript joined forces with Tangentia to provide high-level automation solutions to companies in the FSI space.
In addition, SortSpoke received $4.5 million in a funding round. The round was led by venture capital firm IDEA Fund Partners, venture fund SixThirty Ventures, and a Fortune 500 insurance carrier. AYR (formerly Singularity Systems) partnered with KYP.ai and Eigen Technologies won the “Best Overall Natural Language Processing (NLP) Company” award presented by AI Breakthrough.
Sifted listed Rossum in its top 10 for Europe’s next unicorn as the IDP provider had raised $100 million in a Series A funding in 2021. KMWorld published its AI 50 2022 and nominated 7 Intelligent Document Processing vendors including ABBYY, Ephesoft, expert.ai, Hyperscience, Indico Data, Infrrd and Kofax.
Cortical.io unveiled its breakthrough prototype for classifying high volumes of unstructured text. With its Semantic Folding approach, the company demonstrated a massive 2,800x acceleration and 4,300x increase in energy efficiency compared to BERT, and showed that operating costs can be reduced tremendously.
July ended with a bang as Kofax announced that it had been acquired by private investment firm Clearlake Capital and private equity firm TA Associates. The acquisition by Clearlake Capital and TA Associates was intended to accelerate the growth and innovation of Kofax’s intelligent automation software platform, solutions and cloud capabilities.
More big news:
In August, UiPath acquired natural language processing company Re:infer to expand the capabilities of its platform. In addition, TachyHealth and Medical Refill announced their partnership, UiPath further expanded its partnership with Accelirate, and OpenBots launched its intelligent automation platform.
Kofax came back with another headline when the company acquired Ephesoft. Market analyst Ralph Gammon had an interesting take on the acquisition as he explained why he thought the sale of Ephesoft came at just the right time.
In addition, Parashift received financial support from BLKB, which supported its next phase of growth, while Impactsure Technologies raised $1M as seed capital.
Fall brought funding rounds and partnerships:
Smart Touch Technologies launched its AI-powered platform in early September. Trek Health, an insurance workflow automation platform, closed a $2.7 million seed round led by Lionheart Ventures, and Workist raised €9 million in Series A funding led by Earlybird Venture Capital. Furthermore, Infrrd announced that its Innovation Lab has been recognized by the Association for Computational Linguistics as an innovative problem-solving approach to natural language processing.
Other partnerships announced in September included: JIFFY.ai teamed up with financial services provider Cetera to establish an Automation Center of Excellence and expand Cetera’s automation capabilities, and Parashift joined forces with RegTech solution provider IMTF to integrate Parashift’s IDP solution with IMTF’s applications to enable banks and financial institutions to handle processes such as mortgage applications, mailroom and KYC with minimal effort. In addition, UiPath and qBotica further expanded their partnership and introduced the Automation Cube, which combines the DoqumentAI platform with UiPath’s business automation platform to provide customers with benefits such as lower total cost of ownership and turnkey automation.
Last but not least, ProcessMaker acquired Doculayer in September and integrated Intelligent Document Processing into its business process management platform.
Automation Anywhere secured $200 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital and Hercules Capital. Alkymi received $21 million in Series A funding. The funding round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from existing investors Canaan, Work-Bench and SimCorp.
HuLoop and KYP.ai and Blanc Labs and thirdstream teamed up. Meanwhile, Singularity Systems announced its rebranding to AYR, with the acronym standing for “Are You Ready?” as a question, intended to reflect the company’s forward-thinking approach to solving complex data automation challenges. In addition, AYR announced the appointment of Ryan Raiker as its new VP of Marketing. ABBYY launched Proof of Identity, a solution that makes the digital onboarding process not only more efficient, but also much more secure.
At the end of the month October, FinTech Global released its InsurTech100 report, which included three IDP providers, Cortical.io, Instabase and Quantiphi.
Clinical trial software provider YonaLink raised $6 million led by Debiopharm Innovation Fund. Members of seven tech companies teamed up in the Intelligent Automation Collective (IAC). Along with Emergence Partners, Enate, KYP.ai, OpenDialog, RPA Supervisor and XpertRule, Intelligent Document Processing vendor AntWorks is also part of the collective.
Additionally, Rossum partnered with Celonis to integrate its IDP capabilities with Celonis’ EMS, and the partnership between Hyperscience and Plus Platform combined the IDP solution with Plus Platform’s software for real-time access to mortgage data and loan documents.
2022 ends with more partnerships:
The year ended with partnerships between PLANET AI and Golem.ai to improve inbox automation and Parashift with BSI to combine solutions that enable customers in the banking sector to automate, reduce costs and significantly shorten time to value.
Infrrd’s NLP research team won the Natural Language for Optimization 2022 competition and Impactsure Technologies was selected by Singapore Exchange to extract unstructured annual reports and financial statement data from PDF files of SGX-listed companies.
Last but not least, we welcome one of the youngest IDP providers myBiros (founded in 2021) out of Rome, Italy, to the IDP Community!
Happy New Year and see you next week!
Get industry news distilled, every week:
