Rossum raises $4.5 million to make manual data entry, across all sectors, a thing of the past

Rossum, a London-based deep learning startup, has raised $4.5 million to pursue its mission of making manual data entry completely obsolete, saving businesses time and money (and their employees, sanity). The round was led by LocalGlobe, with participation from Seedcamp, Miton, and StartupYard.

Rossum reports that everyday, the equivalent of 100 human lifetimes are spent on the manual input of data from invoices — just invoices alone. The startup’s tool streamlines this process by boosting efficiency, driving down costs, and saving countless hours of human resources.

In tests, its AI tool has been proven to extract data six times faster than humans, saving companies up to 80 percent of the costs. The company insists, though, that the tool is “designed to help humans, not replace them.” With Rossum, employees can focus on more complex or creative tasks.

“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 co-founder Tomas Gogar.

The software was built by three former AI PhD students, Gogar, Petr Baudis, and Tomas Tunys, who launched the company in 2017. Today the product is used by companies on every continent, including Fortune 500 enterprises such as Siemens.

“When we first started using Rossum’s technology, we couldn’t believe how accurate it was,” said customer Martin Nedopil, a data capture expert from Siemens. “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.”

As for this new investment, Rossum will use the funds to develop the product for multiple sectors and open an office in the US.

LocalGlobe partner Mish Mashkautsan said: “Until now enterprises have depended on data capture solutions that took months to set up and required heavy maintenance. With Rossum they can now deploy in minutes with high accuracy out of the box across countless use-cases. Their product facilitates intuitive feedback which quickly boosts accuracy and efficiency even further. We’re delighted to back Rossum as they build the future of cognitive data capture.”