Rossum reflects on the past year

With the passing of another year we are several steps closer to our goal of creating a world free of manual data entry. We’d like to take a moment to review all that we accomplished over the course of 2019, and share how much we have progressed since our last annual reflection. When we’re in the process of making changes to Rossum, it can be difficult to notice how they can lead to such meaningful improvements for our customers. We have many thanks to give this year – we would be nowhere without our team, customers, partners, mentors, and investors; we want to thank them all for believing in us and in our vision.

TL;DR

The fastest growth in our three-year history. Saved users 360 million keystrokes, equivalent to 50 years of one person typing the same amount of data manually. Secured $4.5 million investment from the backers of Airbnb, UiPath, and TransferWise. Looking forward to keeping an open mind and open platform in 2020.

What happened in 2019?

As Rossum’s third year draws to a close, it is important to reflect on just how far we have come. Last year saw both our team and our global reach grow at the fastest rates in our company’s history. For the second year in a row, our team has nearly doubled in size. To nobody’s surprise, we outgrew our office and began hunting for a bigger one. We finally made the move to a much larger office over the summer and have settled in comfortably, although we foresee another move in the coming year as we continue to expand. 

In addition to bolstering rapid internal growth, we broadened our reach – spanning five continents, organizations that use Rossum now range from startups to Fortune 500 companies. 

While we initially developed Rossum with invoice data capture in mind, we expanded the platform’s capabilities to handle use cases beyond those of accounts payable. We now work with logistics, insurance, and property management companies (to name a few), helping them automate their data capture processes. Last year, one of our clients, Cushman & Wakefield, won the EG Tech Award for Productivity for their Rossum-powered rates demands data capture solution (rates demands are documents specific to the real estate industry). 

Product Improvements

Without a great product, a company is just a group of people getting paid to hang out for 8+ hours a day. In 2019, every person in Rossum worked towards a single goal: delivering a product to our customers that is easy to use and easy to try. We understand that every customer has their own specific requirements, so we focused on making our platform easy to customize to meet each customer’s needs perfectly. 

We implemented hundreds of updates to our platform, focusing primarily on improving its data extraction capabilities, including table data extraction, increased accuracy, and better usability. 

In 2019, Rossum users saved more than 360 million keystrokes, which equals 50 years of one person typing the same amount of data manually. This is an almost 2400x improvement compared to the savings we brought our users in 2018. Also, when compared to manual data entry, our solution is six times faster – a number that we hope to increase in the future until eliminating manual data entry from businesses becomes a no-brainer. 

This is so meaningful to us because our mission has always been “Creating a world free of manual data entry.” Although this is a huge endeavor that we cannot accomplish alone, we have made great strides the past year towards making this a reality. 

We still have a long way to go

We didn’t start Rossum to replace employees; rather, we developed it to provide humans with tools that empower them to create more value. While we have improved these tools, we realize we still have a lot of work to do to eliminate manual data entry completely. 

That is why we are thrilled to have secured $4.5 million in investments to help us get one step closer to making this dream a reality. Support from our amazing investors means the world to us. We look forward to learning from the expertise they gained from working with companies like Airbnb, UiPath, and TransferWise. 

2020: “The Year of Openness”

As we look ahead to 2020, we feel more motivated than ever and we promise to work even harder than we did last year. Our customers love Rossum’s openness and we welcome users to access our free trial, play around with the API, or build on top of our platform. We believe the world of data capture needs some fresh approaches and we’ll strive to be even more open in the future. Stay tuned – you don’t want to miss what we’ve got in store for you!