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Amsterdam, January 24 – Amsterdam-based startup Send AI has raised €2.2 million in an investment round led by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund) and the Dutch VC Keen Venture Partners. Former and current executives from UiPath, MongoDB and Google Deepmind also participated in this round as angels.
The startup, founded in 2021 under the name Autopilot by Thom Trentelman (CEO) and Philip Weijschede (COO), enables companies to automatically read documents and extract key information into their systems with high precision. They particularly focus on complex documents, including low-quality scans, photographed paperwork, and lengthy PDFs.
Thom Trentelman, co-founder and CEO: “Nowadays, people prefer to transfer a document by taking a photo. Due to varying photo quality, traditional document processing software gets stuck more frequently. It also happens that multiple receipts are in one frame. Upright, upside down, different angles – people are very creative. In such cases, data entry works are prompted to copy paste the information from the document by hand, which is a time-consuming and error-prone task.”
As the name implies, Send AI makes heavy use of artificial intelligence (AI). In contrast to almost every other AI startup, the company consciously chooses to bypass generic powerhouse models such as ChatGPT from OpenAI. The company prefers the use of a combination of smaller open-source models, keeping sensitive customer data on its own premise. Thom Trentelman adds: “The speed, significantly lower cost, and ability to have each user train their own models also plays a significant role in this decision.”
Although the platform is now being used in various industries, health insurers were the first to start processing large volumes of claim documents. To keep up with the growing demand, the decision was made to cross the ocean to Silicon Valley in search of an investor. Here they first met with San Francisco based Gradient Ventures who opted to lead the round. Philip Weijschede, co-founder and COO, notes: “Coincidentally, Keen Venture Partners got hold of us around the same time, which in the end still gave this investment round a Dutch twist.”
The funding will be used to strengthen the team, accelerate the development of its internal AI models, and prepare for the expansion into international markets.
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