Veryfi Raises $12 Million To Use AI To Tackle The Unstructured Data Entry Market

Five years ago friends Ernest Semerda and Dmitry Birulia were on a surfing trip in Pacifica, California when they got to talking about their families and discovered that both of their mothers worked as bookkeepers. Birulia’s lived in Belarus, Semerda’s in Australia, and yet both moms faced similar career-long pain points around manual data entry. As software engineers, both working at coupon company Quotient Technologies, Semerda and Birulia set out to find a solution.

“People are talking about flying cars, but why the hell are we still using people to process financial documents?” Semerda tells Forbes. 

A few years of research and a stint at Y Combinator later resulted in Veryfi, a suite of API software that allows users to upload documents, like a W-2 or an invoice, to the platform and it will extract and compile the important info into structured data. It’s fast, efficient, and limits the space for human error, which can contribute up to business losses in the millions. Founded in 2017 and launched publicly in 2020, the San Francisco-based company is already profitable and recently raised a $12 million Series A round, as first reported in the Midas Touch newsletter. NewView Capital led the round with participation from TI Platform Management and Act One Ventures.

Intrigued by the opportunity to digitize another industry, NewView Capital, which spunout from NewView from NEA with a late-stage investment portfolio in 2018, jumped in early. “When you use this, you get this business intelligence unlocked in seconds versus minutes or hours,” says NewView’s Ravi Viswanathan. “That reminded me of Plaid, which decreased the time to insight by orders of magnitude.” NewView principal Jazmin Medina, who sleuthed the startup, will also take a board seat. The firm will use the capital for marketing and to keep up with the surge in demand due to companies looking to digitize in the pandemic. 

Veryfi is ready to use, right out of the box with no training necessary. “That is a total game changer in this industry,” Semerda says. “Enterprise firms would have to spend close to half a million dollars setting things up, and the next few months onboarding. That just consumes so much time. With Veryfi, they sign up and within one minute, they have access.” The startup also keeps prices low, with $5 per user per month for some functions, making it widely accessible for businesses of different sizes.  

While Veryfi is built to make data entry quicker, the startup is also focused on making the process more secure and code compliant. Semerda’s former startup, VectorCare, a healthcare platform for providers, navigates HIPAA compliance guidelines and the founder has carried the tight focus on privacy to Veryfi. The company is currently GDPR compliant in addition to SOC Type 2 certified, an industry privacy metric that is certified by an outside auditor. Semerda adds that Veryfi also gives customers complete control over their data with multiple options of what to do after they use the system.

Birulia says the company is just scratching the surface of its potential as much of their focus has been on financial-focused documents thus far. The founders also hope Veryfi will play an increasing role in helping to make data entry more accurate, improving on an area that is currently riddled with errors across industries. Semerda argues, in fields like healthcare, where such mistakes are common and costly, taking out that margin of error could be huge. “The fact that we are using humans is causing a lot of problems,” he says.  “It’s just crazy if we can remove the human component, financial errors will hopefully reduce.”