Telstra Ventures has taken a strategic stake in California-based robotic digitisation company Ripcord which specialises in in document management.
Billed by Telstra Ventures as the “world’s first” robotic digitisation company, Ripcord takes static paper records in customers’ warehouses and uses robotic digitisation to scan, handle optical character recognition and upload them to its cloud platform Ripcord Canopy, which can be easily integrated into existing enterprise systems.
Mark Sherman, managing director of Telstra Ventures, said the investment was driven by Ripcord’s ability to disrupt the traditional records management market with its solution which includes shipping, scanning, indexing, auto-classifying of documents, and unlimited access to their cloud platform, Ripcord Canopy.
“The records management market is valued at US$62 billion and is comprised of records and information management, managed print service and enterprise content management," he said.
{loadposition peter}“Ripcord is working towards a paperless world and is using sophisticated automation and software to turn their paper records into a secure, fast and all-inclusive records management solution.”
“While other vendors can only provide point solutions for the lifecycle of document digitisation, Ripcord offers an end-to-end solution that helps reduce the cost for enterprises to manage physical document boxes and make these documents digitally accessible.
“It is believed that customers can save approximately 90 per cent on their document management costs with Ripcord. This would be a significant benefit for our government and financial services customers, so we are keen to bring Ripcord’s solution to them.”
Alex Fielding, chief executive and co-founder of Ripcord, welcomed the investment from Telstra as the company is expanding to new markets and developing new robots.
“We are proud to be the first company to apply vision robotics to paper digitisation. The robots we developed can process documents 10-times faster than human-based scanning. We can digitise over 2.5 million documents a day with the number expected to rise to 50 million by the end of 2018,” said Fielding.
“We have a mission to build the products and services that will take the world paperless. Since our launch earlier this year, we have not only helped companies in the US with document management, but we have received requests from global companies around the world. We look forward to leveraging Telstra’s network in Asia-Pacific to assist us achieve our mission.”