FinTech Collective Invests in Ocrolus

The digital front-ends produced by online lenders might lead you to believe that issuing a loan is driven by software and machines. In reality, humans on the back-end manually review bank statements and other financial documents, verify information, and key data into loan origination systems. As a result, underwriting can take weeks and lenders are often blind to fraud.

Ocrolus is building a new, intelligent layer that leapfrogs painful data entry and bridges the gap between analog documents and financial software. Ocrolus collapses document processing from weeks to minutes, regardless of file format or quality, and analyzes documents with 99%+ accuracy. The company solves this problem with an elegant blend of artificial intelligence and crowdsourced human quality control, enabling firms to streamline their underwriting with a high degree of trust.

By digitizing analog information, Ocrolus also provides analytics that better detect loan stacking and other forms of fraud, which is a massive issue for lenders. About 4.5% of people who receive an unsecured loan take out a second on the same day, often with no intent to repay, resulting in billions lost every year.

Though the company’s roots are in online small business lending, Ocrolus is now processing documents for consumer lenders, mortgage providers, and Medicaid. We believe this is the tip of the iceberg, with a much broader automation opportunity across financial services and potentially other sectors as well.

Ocrolus has clearly struck a chord in their core verticals, having grown more than 5x since announcing its Series A round in April 2018, with zero customer churn.

Beyond the exceptional product and growth, the Ocrolus team has demonstrated a unique ability to execute with pace. They’ve tested and learned their way into product-market fit multiple times, and continue to expand the scope of what Ocrolus can achieve. They’ve also built an incredible team and culture that we are proud to now be a part of.

VENTUREBEAT, KYLE WIGGERS [link]

Ocrolus, a New York startup that taps AI and machine learning to parse financial documents, today announced it has raised $24 million in a series B round led by venture growth equity firm Oak HC/FT. Ocrolus cofounder and CEO Sam Bobley said the fresh capital, which follows a $4 million series A in April 2018 and brings the company’s total raised to about $30 million, will fuel expansion into verticals like consumer and auto lending and advance development of the company’s underwriting solutions for banks.

“Sometimes humans are better than robots,” said Bobley, who added that Ocrolus has quintupled in size since April 2018 and now counts hundreds of financial services companies among its customer base. “We combine machine processes with live human intelligence to provide customers with a complete solution. The capital will be used to develop workflows for new document types and sharpen our fraud detection and analytical capabilities.”

In that respect, Ocrolus’ offering is a lot like Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Textract, which uses machine learning to parse data tables, forms, and whole pages for text and data. London-based Flux offers a comparable file-parsing service targeted at retailers, and Upflow’s tech leverages OCR to autonomously detect and extract customer names, amounts, due dates, and more from invoices.

But as chief operating officer Vik Dua explains, Ocrolus’ focus is narrower in scope, which enables it to address domain-specific problems that commonly throw other platforms for a loop. “Our infrastructure is highly scalable and continually teaches itself to become smarter,” he added. “We’re excited to accelerate our product roadmap and alleviate additional pain points for our customers. Ocrolus is poised to improve the quality of work in use cases across financial services and beyond.”

Ocrolus offers a turnkey solution hosted on AWS. The platform reviews bank e-statements, scans, and cell phone pictures of printed statements and generates custom-tailored analytics, ultimately geared toward tracking account balances, detecting money movement, and identifying missing or fraudulent information. Its API plugs into Salesforce and other customer relationship management platforms, and it guarantees a baseline level of security with 256-bit AES encryption, SSL authentication, and multifactor authentication.

“Ocrolus is a unique company providing a rare combination of smart automation, analytics, and accuracy in its solution,” said Oak HC/FT venture partner Dan Petrozzo. “By combining its tremendous technology with an added human touch where required, the platform delivers amazing results for its customers.”

FINTECH FUTURES, JANE CONNOLLY [link]

Financial document analysis platform Ocrolus has closed a $24 million Series B funding round led by Oak HC/FT, reports Jane Connolly.

FinTech Collective and existing investors including Bullpen Capital and QED Investors – which was co-founded by Capital One founder Nigel Morris – also participated in the round.

Ocrolus combines artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourced human quality control to automate the analysis of financial documents to 99% accuracy. The turnkey solution can analyse images of any format or quality and return actionable data in minutes.

The company will use the funds to automate underwriting workflows for lenders and banks and expand into new verticals.

“Sometimes humans are better than robots,” says Sam Bobley, co-founder and CEO of Ocrolus. “We combine machine processes with live human intelligence to provide customers with a complete solution. The capital will be used to develop workflows for new document types and sharpen our fraud detection and analytical capabilities.”

Dan Petrozzo, venture partner at Oak HC/FT, adds: “Ocrolus is a unique company providing a rare combination of smart automation, analytics and accuracy in its solution. By combining its tremendous technology with an added human touch where required, the platform delivers amazing results for its customers.”

Since its Series A round in April 2018, Ocrolus has seen five-times growth and built on its success in the small business lending market to branch out into consumer, auto and mortgage lending.