Docsumo, a Singapore-headquartered document artificial intelligence (AI) startup, announced Thursday is has raised $3.5 million in seed capital led by Common Ocean.

The round also saw the participation from Fifth Wall, Arbor Realty Trust, and existing investor Better Capital, Docsumo said in a statement.

The startup plans to utilize the fresh funds to expand its client base in the North American market and grow the team.

With this new investment, Docsumo also plans to continue to grow its products to cover additional use cases – customer onboarding, income verification, financial fraud detection, data for underwriting, and other critical, everyday tasks currently handled by analysts.

Founded in Jan. 2019 by Rushabh Sheth and Bikram Dahal, Docsumo helps enterprises capture, validate, and analyze data from unstructured documents for automated decisions. The startup’s core technology platform helps commercial lenders and insurers read financial statements, tax returns, insurance policies, and other documents required for credit and insurance applications.

Bikram used to be a data entry clerk and experienced how difficult and boring manual entry is firsthand. In fact, most document processing is outsourced to Asian countries such as India, where whole floors of people process applications for financial services. The team is applying machine learning technology to automate a core aspect of what humans do – reading text.

“We enable companies to unlock 10x efficiency and act on incoming documents in real-time. What differentiates Docsumo is that the technology can accurately extract data from business documents with a high degree of structural variability, and automate decisioning workflows end-to-end,” said Rushabh.

“Covid has propelled enterprise automation and further API-fication of business processes, both great tailwinds towards faster adoption of our software,” he added.

Over the last 12 months, Docsumo has grown its team in Mumbai, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, and has experienced a 6 times revenue increase. It currently services major enterprises in the United States, European Union, and Asia, including Arbor Realty Trust, National Debt Relief, Hitachi, PayU, and many others. Docsumo was previously part of the Techstars London accelerator in 2020 and raised a pre-seed round from Barclays, Sequoia, Jiten Gupta of Jupiter Money, and Amrish Rau of Pine Labs among others.

“We’ve deployed Docsumo’s technology across our portfolio companies and have seen firsthand how effective it is at automating critical business decisions. The team has been amazing to work with and we are excited to join their journey as they unlock opportunities to apply AI/ML to business processes,” commented Igor Ulis, General Partner at Common Ocean, who led the round.

Singapore FoodTech firm Umami Meats secures $2.4M pre-seed funding to advance cultivated seafood