Document AI startup Docsumo raises $3.5 million funding; aims to create hundreds of jobs in Nepal and India

Docsumo, a document AI startup that helps enterprises make automated decisions from customer documents has recently raised $3.5 Million (approximately 43 crores NPR) in seed capital. The company was co-founded by a Young Nepali Data Scientist turned Entrepreneur, Mr. Bikram Dahal along with his Indian counterpart Mr. Rushabh Sheth in January 2019. The startup’s core technology is fueled by Nepal’s homegrown Data Scientists and Engineers that help businesses read financial documents automatically and make decisions based on it.

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 & India, and grow its client base in the North American market.  Bikram Dahal, CTO (left) & Rushabh Sheth, CEO (right)

During his college days, Bikram used to be a data entry clerk and experienced how difficult and boring manual entry is. Researching about it, 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.

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. ”

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, EU, and Asia. 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,” commented 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 – 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-fiction of business processes, both great tailwinds towards faster adoption of our software,” said Rushabh.