Ripcord, a startup that develops robots that can automatically digitize paper records, hopes to raise between $20 million and $25 million in a new funding round that would value the company at $110 million before entry, according to a source familiar with the matter. subject and a presentation platform seen by TechCrunch.
Alphabet’s GV, Lux Capital and MUFG are in talks to participate in the round. GV and Lux previously invested in Ripcord; MUFG, a Japanese banking chain, appears to be a new sponsor.
We reached out to Ripcord’s chief marketing officer, Molly Vernarecci, via LinkedIn for comment. She did not respond at the time of publication.
The round, if successful, would bring the total raised by Ripcord to around $150 million, the bulk of which came from previous investors Kleiner Perkins, Silicon Valley Bank, Tyche Partners, Icon Ventures and Baidu. Notably, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, participated in Ripcord’s series A.
The new round would also be significantly smaller than Ripcord’s latest tranche, a Series B, which closed at $45 million. The reason was not immediately clear, nor was the reason for the relatively long interval, three years, between Ripcord’s external infusions.
Ripcord has He found himself at the center of a controversy before, which might have something to do with it.
In 2018, a former Ripcord employee, Peter Coneybeer, alleged inappropriate behavior by then-CEO Alex Fielding and several other unnamed employees. In a Medium post, Coneybeer claimed that Fielding told graphic, sexually tinged stories and made crude comments about pumping his breast milk, and that he was retaliated against for reporting an employee’s inappropriate sexual behavior to Human Resources.
In response to the allegations, Ripcord said its board of directors would investigate and “take appropriate action.” Three years later, Fielding became a board director, a role he held for two and a half years before leaving Ripcord to found space startup Privateer.
In the filing shared with TechCrunch, Ripcord claims to have secured a “fundamental agreement” with the IRS for the processing of tax documents worth more than $4 million and an expanded agreement with the US Air Force. MUFG is a client as well as an investor, the pitch deck reveals, with an annual contract value of $5 million. And Ripcord says it’s in the final stages of a big deal with Wells Fargo.
Image credits: Ripcord
In 2020, Ripcord claimed to be processing more than one billion pages per year for clients such as Coca-Cola, BP, Chevron, UCLA, Cantium, and several Fortune 100 companies, including three of the top five financial services companies and three of the largest . five insurance companies. Coca-Cola remains a customer, according to the presentation platform. But the status of several of the others is unclear.
However, Ripcord’s revenue was $11.8 million in 2022, up from $5.9 million in 2021, according to the filing platform. The company, which is currently unprofitable, expects to end 2023 with $22.5 million in revenue and reach $49.2 million in revenue by the fourth quarter of 2024.
Ripcord was founded by three entrepreneurs, Fielding (former Apple engineer), Kim Lembo (NASA veteran), and Kevin Hall. The company develops physical robots that scan documents autonomously, even removing staples. Through partnerships with logistics companies, Ripcord transports files containing barcode labels with metadata to its facilities, where it scans and stores them to meet compliance requirements or shreds and recycles them.
Ripcord makes most of its money by charging for document scans, between $0.08 and $0.25 per image.
Employing computer vision, lifting and positioning arms and RGB cameras, Ripcord’s robots can handle a variety of document formats while classifying and extracting data. On the software side, the company’s platform, which integrates with a range of third-party business intelligence and data processing software, uploads documents to the cloud and converts them into searchable PDF files.
To fuel its next phase of growth, Ripcord, fresh off an integration partnership with OpenAI, is developing a generative ai tool that the startup intended to launch in September, according to the pitch deck. Called Docufai, the freemium tool is designed for document discovery, providing a way for customers to ask questions about scanned documents and get answers.
The presentation deck shows Ripcord’s proposed product roadmap for Docufai, which includes a future document translation feature, an ability to find related documents, and sharing features, including a collaborative notebook. Ripcord aims to add 1,000 users to Docufai by the end of Q3 2023 and launch a paid tier, followed by teams and enterprise tiers, sometime in 2024.
