The Startup by Belarusian entrepreneur raises $12M after graduating from Y Combinator

Belarusian Dmitry Birulia and Australian Ernest Semerda have the same background: both of their mothers were accountants Despite the difference in geography, the women’s problems were the same — manual data entry. Therefore, the first project of the entrepreneurs, bringing them to Y Combinator, trained a neural network to recognize information on invoices and receipts for subsequent expense control.

As a result, the technology for recognizing text on financial documents turned out to be a sought-after idea for a business, around which the startup Veryfi grew. A few days ago it was announced that $12M investment was raised in Series A financing. The round was led by NewView Capital with participation from TI Platform Management and Act One Ventures.

“People talk about flying cars, but what the hell are we still using people to process financial documents?” — says cofounder Semerda. Using API technology, Veryfi helps extract and structure data from financial documents. The lack of human factor in this process avoids errors and hence multi-million dollar losses for businesses. Some business intelligence features of the service will cost the user from $5 per month.

According to Dmytro Biruli, the project has focused on documents oriented only on finance until now. The founders hope Veryfi will play an increasingly important role in providing accurate data entry across industries. Semerda argues that in areas such as healthcare, for example, where such errors are common and costly, eliminating this error could be huge. “The fact that we are using people causes a lot of problems,” he says. “It’s just crazy that by simply removing the human element, we reduce financial errors.”