How DocDigitizer grew 6x in 2020!

Written by: João Fernandes    (4-min reading)

As in any early-stage startup, time seems to pass by very quickly. We often lose sight of where we were a few weeks ago, making it very difficult to do a proper retrospective of the year.

Looking back on the last 12 months at DocDigitizer, we may say that 2020 was a considerable surprise despite all odds.

We started the year closing a pre-seed round focused on speeding up our international expansion, then COVID-19 struck and made us quickly adapt to a completely different reality.

The pandemic made us change the way we work, forcing us to move to fully remote and impacting some of our strategic goals, delaying key projects within strongly affected industries.

It was at the peak of the pandemic when we started to notice a considerable demand for DocDigitizer. Our mailboxes were filled with demands rising in particular within financial services and insurance companies that were at the time struggling to keep up with demand within their digital channels. They were looking for automation tools that could help them quickly automate their KYC, AML, and claims processes.

By that time, we were also challenged by our partner Multicert to provide an integrated solution for several financial institutions in Portugal to help them process COVID-19 relief programs applications. These institutions were facing massive delays due to bureaucratic bottlenecks regarding application validation and approval, which further impacted the economic response to the COVID-19 crisis.

By the end of April, we doubled in size. We were growing 6x per month, raising enormous challenges for our operational and technology teams, who were working against the clock to ensure that our technology could make a difference and help our economy in a time of need.

By the end of July, we reached hundreds of thousands of applications processed, which allowed these institutions to reduce their approval cycle significantly and enabled the distribution of more than 4b€ in relief funding via our platform.

2020 was also a year of significant breakthroughs in our IP strategy. We rolled out a new version of DocDigitizer's technology affectionately called V2.

DocDigitizer V2 constitutes a notable milestone, opening a door for a giant leap forward in two different dimensions:

• First, this version provides a series of data capture engines powered by NLP and deep learning that enables creating a document DNA signature. Based on this signature and supported by state of the art AI-based models, DocDigitizer can reach recognition rates way beyond the competition. Along the way, DocDigitizer learns and generalizes knowledge between domains, allowing it to be utterly agnostic in regard to the domain, document format, layout, or even language of the extracted information.
• Second, this version makes an AI-assisted document validation platform available, where our data curation team undertakes the quality assurance processes needed to meet our 100% accuracy commitment. V2 introduces a human orchestration engine that is responsible for intelligently distributing the workload, considering variables such as the data curator expertise, availability, fatigue, allowing humans and machines to work side by side at scale and reducing the average revision time and cost by 10x.

2020 was also a year of continuous investment in our partnerships, resulting in developing strategic projects with crucial international financial institutions by integrating DocDigitizer within robot process automation (RPA) and low-code initiatives.

Our partner network grew by 10x during 2020. We are now working side by side with RPA, low-code and digital transformation international partners in joint projects where DocDigitizer is used as an automation enabler for technologies such as Uipath, Outsystems, Mendix, Blue Prism, SAP, and many others!

We closed the year by doubling our current customer base's revenue and reaching a significant expansion milestone with a 0% churn rate!

We made a significant effort to nurture these long-standing relationships. We were always fully engaged with the customer to help them take advantage of DocDigitizer as a tool for process optimization when there is considerable pressure over their cost structure.

Through the amazing work and dedication of our team, never forgetting the value of Growth, Transparency, Ownership, Collaboration, Performance, and Self-Improvement, we were able to close 2020 with a 6x growth rate and a 6 figure ARR after processing millions of data points per month, expanding to new geographies and use cases, and releasing a new version of DocDigitizer's platform.

The results of 2020 went way beyond what was expected when we started last year and raised the bar for 2021. We expect to increase our growth rate exponentially, exploring the huge opportunities opened by COVID-19 for digital transformation and automation in an economy where efficiency will be key to any business’ success.