AI Startup DocSumo, Co-Founded by Nepali Founder, Raises $3.5 Million Funding

Docsumo, a document AI startup that helps enterprises make automated decisions from customer documents, has recently raised $3.5 million (approximately NPR 43 crores) in seed funding.

The company was co-founded by a young Nepali data scientist turned entrepreneur Mr. Bikram Dahal (CTO) along with his Indian counterpart Mr. Rushabh Sheth (CEO) in January 2019.

During his college days, Bikram used to be a data entry clerk and experienced how difficult and boring manual entry is. During his research, he realized the scale of this problem and decided to build technology to solve it by automating a core aspect of what humans do—reading text.

Docsumo

The startup’s core technology is fueled by Nepal’s homegrown data scientists and engineers, which helps businesses read financial documents automatically and make decisions based on them.

The platform helps in the automation and analysis of financial data. It helps companies and firms convert unstructured documents into structured data.

Over the last 12 months, Docsumo has grown its team in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has experienced a 6x revenue increase. It currently serves major enterprises in the US, the EU, and Asia.

Investment

The investment round was led by Common Ocean with participation from Fifth Wall, Arbor Realty Trust, and existing investor Better Capital. The startup plans to utilize the fresh funds to expand its growing team in Nepal and India and to grow its client base in the North American market.

Commenting on the investment, Bikram said,

“From day one, we had this belief that we can build global SAAS software from Nepal.

We have 25 Data Scientists and Engineers working in Kathmandu at present – we are planning to take this number to 100 by the end of this year. Our aim is to help Nepal become a technology hub like Israel.”

Docsumo was previously part of the Techstars London accelerator in 2020 and raised a pre-seed round from Barclays, Sequoia, Jiten Gupta of Jupiter Money, and Amrish Rau of Pine Labs among others.

“We’ve deployed Docsumo’s technology across our portfolio companies and have seen firsthand how effective it is at automating critical business decisions. The team has been amazing to work with and we are excited to join their journey as they unlock opportunities to apply AI/ML to business processes,”

—Igor Ulis, General Partner at Common Ocean who led the investment round.

With this new investment, Docsumo plans to continue to grow its products to cover additional use cases such as customer onboarding, income verification, financial fraud detection, data for underwriting, and other critical, everyday tasks currently handled by analysts.

“Covid has propelled enterprise automation and further API-fication of business processes, both great tailwinds towards faster adoption of our software.” said Rushabh.

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