Deep Cognition, which offers an AI platform for automating the data-entry process, says it plans to use most of the $1.25 million it recently raised in convertible notes to scale its go-to-market strategy for B2B sales.
The latest raise means the Dallas-based software developer has secured “several million dollars” from a combination of Texas- and California-based venture capital firms and angel investors since its founding in 2017, the company says. Investors have included Mark Cuban, the Baylor Angel Network, and TiE Angels from Dallas and Silicon Valley, it adds.
The company’s goal now: continue expanding its team of more than 25 full-time employees and dedicated contractors in sales, marketing, product, and tech.
Co-founded by Chief Technology Officer Mandeep Kumar, Deep Cognition credits its “outsized growth” over the last year in part to good timing, as artificial intelligence in general has been hitting its inflection point.
But it’s also coincided with the company’s move to combine the “superpowers” of Kumar, whose background is in the deep learning AI field, and Kurt Knapton, who joined Deep Cognition as CEO in January.
Knapton previously held top executive positions with Dallas first-party market data platform Dynata (originally e-Rewards).
Pivoting Toward Success
Deep Cognition didn’t start out in the data-entry field.
In fact, its first main product—Deep Learning Studio, released in 2017—was aimed at helping companies design their own AI strategies, applications, and models through visual programming.
Soon enough, however, the company noticed that businesses were struggling to deploy AI solutions quickly and at scale. At the same time, it saw that highly regulated industries were having trouble using traditional technology to automate complex and expensive manual data-entry tasks.
As a result, Deep Cognition pivoted its focus and, in 2019, launched a next-generation AI platform called PaperEntry. The proprietary platform, one of several alternatives in the field, saves time and resources by using deep learning to accurately automate even the most complex and unstructured manual data-entry jobs in regulated environments, the company says.
It rapidly found success in the “customs clearance” market, where huge shipping containers of goods cross national borders with a myriad of complicated, unstructured documents.
The company’s key customers include Global 2000 companies in cross-border transportation and logistics, as well as several public-sector entities.
So far, according to its website, the Deep Cognition platform has been utilized in 10 countries and processed more than one million pages, saving companies more than one million human hours.
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