VentureBeat By Blair Hanley Frank
Ripcord, a company that aims to do away with the piles of paper enterprises keep around, has raised a $25 million round led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) to fuel its robotic-assisted paper digitization business.
Telstra Ventures, Icon Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lux Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank also participated in the round, which comes months after the company’s initial $40 million series B round. This latest investment was separately priced from the initial series B, but Ripcord is calling it a B1 round.
The startup provides companies with robots and software for digitizing the reams of paper documents they have sitting around the office or in offsite storage facilities. This is a particularly acute problem for large enterprises that have been around for years, accumulating records that can’t be disposed of but that are also not searchable or easily accessible when needed.
The product has brought Ripcord a number of key customers, including Bechtel and UCLA, and the startup counts members of the Fortune 100 and Global 10 as customers, cofounder and CEO Alex Fielding told VentureBeat in an interview.
It’s also a natural fit for GV, considering Google’s history of scanning books. To date, the startup has raised a combined $74.5 million, with $65 million of that coming this year.
Ripcord plans to use its funding to grow its business significantly. The company already has 100 employees and it expects to more than double its headcount in the next 12 months. Fielding said that the company’s ultimate goal is to help eliminate the headaches that paper can cause in the enterprise. While storing hard copy information has been the default for decades, he thinks it’s time for companies to move their records into the digital age.
The news comes alongside the launch of the second version of the company’s Canopy software, which is designed to help customers get the most out of their scanned documents once Ripcord has processed them. That service can now connect with outside sources and handle chain-of-custody tracking for records that are stored within it.
That second feature, known as RecordChain, is supposed to provide enterprises with an indelible record of who modified document records and when, for both legal compliance and security purposes.