Plug & Play ventures
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Arbolus raises $6M from Fuel Ventures and Plug and Play to apply ML to expert knowledge
Leveraging networks of “experts” online started out as a very manual online business. But it’s rapidly becoming more efficient as machine learning is applied to the whole business model. Indeed, in the U.K. alone $60 billion is spent a year on using outside expertise. Large players in this space include GLG, Third Bridge, Guidepoint and AlphaSights. And we saw recently that proSapient has raised $18 million for its SaaS platform for managing expert networks.
Now Barcelona-based Arbolus has raised a $6 million funding round led by early-stage U.K. VC Fuel Ventures, in addition to Plug and Play Ventures, better known in Silicon Valley.
The three-year old startup claims it has seen a 7x growth YoY and now has offices in Barcelona and New York. It’s also appointed Pau Beltran at CTO, who was formerly of Disney, eDreams, OneMind and others.
Arbolus’ approach to “enterprise knowledge,” as it’s known, is employing natural language processing and an AI backbone to its platform.
Whereas proSapient uses technology to make expert sourcing more efficient, Arbolus captures recordings of expert interviews, transcribes them on its platform and then shares that knowledge within companies’ networks that subscribe to the platform.
Companies using the platform pay fees to actually use the software, and use all of the toolsets that are on there. It also makes transaction fees when companies pay independent experts on its platform.
Sam Glasswell, CEO and co-founder of Arbolus, said in a statement: “Having the right information gives you a competitive edge but the typical means of engaging with experts through one-hour calls alone is failing to deliver value. These interviews are usually held by a single department and their findings end up lost in PowerPoint presentations or reports. Therefore, companies are only building up a short-term view. We are bringing innovation to the ways companies are working with external experts by using groundbreaking technology to, not just build expertise within organizations, but deliver it in ways that are digestible, searchable and, most importantly, usable for the months and years ahead across different departments.”
Mark Pearson, managing partner from Fuel Ventures, added: “Arbolus have done amazing things in its first 24 months and it’s a testament to the entrepreneurial ambition of Sam and Will backed up by their experience of helping to scale a $1 billion company in their former lives.”
Arbolus says it is working with more than 80 customers, including Big Four firms such as KPMG, and startups like UiPath.
Founders Sam Glasswell and Will Leeming scaled an expert agency before this startup and realized a lot of knowledge was being lost in these expert networks because it simply wasn’t being captured in the right way. And they decided to base the company in Barcelona because it was able to attract talent and had all the advantages of being in the EU.
Glasswell told me: “In Barcelona we have an awesome office, our own space, a great team it’s certainly a beautiful city, and we’re able to attract really really top talent. I mean, people will move from anywhere in the world to go to Barcelona. It’s probably been one of the biggest success factors for us so far. Does the EU factor, help? Yes, I mean the fact that is in the EU in the trading bloc of the union does help… and we thought we’d just be able to build a much more culturally diverse team in the long run.”
Certainly, the future of work looks like it is shifting toward one where outside experts are used more and more by companies. If the gig economy has affected your pizza delivery, it’s also affecting the knowledge economy.
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Hypatos gets $11.8M for a deep learning approach to document processing
Process automation startup Hypatos has raised a €10 million (~$11.8 million) seed round of funding from investors including Blackfin Tech, Grazia Equity, UVC Partners and Plug & Play Ventures.
The Germany and Poland-based company was spun out of AI for accounting startup Smacc at the back end of 2018 to apply deep learning tech to power a wider range of back-office automation, with a focus on industries with heavy financial document processing needs, such as the financial and insurance sectors.
Hypatos is applying language processing AI and computer vision tech to speed up financial document processing for business use cases such as invoices, travel and expense management, loan application validation and insurance claims handling via — touting a training data set of more than 10 million annotated data entities.
It says the new seed funding will go on R&D to expand its portfolio of AI models so it can automate business processing for more types of documents, as well as for fueling growth in Europe, North American and Asia. Its customer base at this point includes Fortune 500 companies, major accounting firms and more than 300 software companies.
While there are plenty of business process automation plays, Hypatos says its use of deep learning tech supports an “in-depth understanding” of document content — which in turn allows it to offer customers a “soup to nuts” automation menu that covers document classification, information capturing, content validation and data enrichment.
It dubs its approach “cognitive process automation” (CPA) versus more basic applications of business process automation with software robots (RPA), which it argues aren’t so contextually savvy — thereby claiming an edge.
As well as document processing solutions, it has developed machine learning modules for enhancing customers’ existing systems (e.g. ECM, ERP, CRM, RPA); and offers APIs for software providers to draw on its machine learning tech for their own applications.
“All offerings include machine learning pipeline software for continuous model training in the cloud or in on-premise deployments,” it notes in a press release.
“We have deep knowledge of how financial documents are processed and millions of data entities in our training data,” says chief commercial officer Cem Dilmegani, discussing where Hypatos fits in the business process automation landscape. “We get compared to RPA companies like UiPath, enterprise content management (ECM) companies like Kofax Readsoft as well as generalist ML document automation companies like Hyperscience. However, we are quite different.
“We focus on end-to-end automation, we don’t only help companies capture data, we help them process it using our deep domain understanding, enabling higher rates of automation. For example, to automate incoming invoice processing (A/P automation) we apply our document understanding AI to capture all data, classify the document, identify the specific goods and services, validate for internal/external compliance and assign financial accounts, cost centers, cost categories etc. to automate all processing tasks.
“Finally, we offer this technology as components easily accessible via APIs. This allows RPA or ECM users to leverage our technology and increase their level of automation.”
Hypatos claims it’s seeing uplift as a result of the coronavirus pandemic — noting it’s providing a service to more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies to help with in-shoring efforts, which it says are accelerating as a result of COVID-19 putting pressure on the traditional business process outsourcing model as offshore workforce productivity in lower wage regions is affected by coronavirus lockdowns.
“We believe that we are in a pivotal moment of machine learning adoption in large organizations,” adds Andreas Unseld, partner at UVC Partners, in a supporting statement. “Hypatos’ technology provides ample opportunity to transform many core business processes. We’re impressed by the Hypatos machine learning technology and see the team in a perfect position to take a leading role in the machine learning revolution to come.”
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