US startup Ripcord has just been handed $25 million (£19 million) of Google Ventures funding to help eliminate all paper from offices, with its robot that can automate the digitisation of documents.
The company was founded by ex-NASA and Apple employees, so no wonder it’s so intelligent.
The glorified scanner can read documents, removing staples and other information not needed in the images and then converts it into fully readable, searchable text. It then uploads the documents to the cloud, meaning anyone who needs to access them can do so, either in the office or remotely.
The Ripcord robot can scan anything at all – from business cards right up to huge architectural drawings and then make then fully editable too if need be.
“We’ve seen an explosion in demand for a solution that drags society from the paper era into a truly digital one,” Ripcord CEO Alex Fielding told the Daily Mail. “Customers want both digitisation and an easy-to-use platform that helps them manage their entire records repository, whether it is comprised of paper files or digital ones.
“However, building a simple platform is actually quite complex. By partnering with Google Ventures we can take advantage of their expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We know their resources will be invaluable.”
In the future, Ripcord wants to fill warehouses with the robots, so businesses can use them as a service rather than having to deploy them in their own business. Fielding explained vast containers of paperwork could be moved around by other robots, digitising 50 million records a day.
A Ripcord robot can fully digitise a record in 1-2 hours, whereas this would take a human 6-8 hours.
“Many companies, especially those that operate in regulated industries, still generate enormous volumes of paper, which is costly to store and cumbersome to manage,’ Google Ventures general partner Andy Wheeler added.
