Rossum Closes Seed Investment from Miton on DemoDay
It didn’t take long. Yesterday afternoon, as the StartupYard teams were relaxing and quietly gearing up to pitch at the StartupYard Batch 7 DemoDay, the Rossum team Petr Baudis, Tomas Gogar, and Tomas Tunys were signing a seed funding round.
A few hours later, live on stage at the biggest demo day in the region’s history, (and with nearly 1,000 tuned in live on Facebook), Rossum announced that the respected Czech investment firm Miton, had contributed seed capital to help propel the team toward global ambitions. This morning, CzechCrunch ran with the story on its front page as well.
About the Deal
The investment solidifies an existing relationship between the Rossum team and Miton, that began with Rossum’s founders consulting with Miton’s portfolio companies on machine learning projects. Miton Co-Founder Ondrej Raska had, according to the Rossum team, been looking for a way to enter the machine learning and AI field, but had so far not come across a project that was clear enough to dive into.
That changed when Rossum approached Raska and Miton with the idea of automating invoice management, along with a host of other challenges, using a unique approach to machine learning. Discussion quickly shifted to a strategic partnership and investment, with Miton to become an active part of the Rossum project, and Raska to play a day-to-day role in the growth of the startup. Rossum has already produced a proof of concept that they say can beat OCR technology, and is approaching human level accuracy:
In 60 days, @RossumAi developed an AI that can read invoices better than OCR technology under development for 25 years! #sy17 pic.twitter.com/wRUSicDLTc
— StartupYard (@startupyard) February 22, 2017
Co-Founder Tomas Gogar said of the investment and cooperation: “We think that Miton is an ideal partner for us. They are very active in the companies they invest in, helping to shape their products. Their history shows that this approach has paid off, and we believe that it will be a big help to us as well. For us, as a very technically oriented team, this is a new experience. We feel that we can help Miton push forward into the Artificial Intelligence playing field.”
Raska spoke to a similar sentiment, saying: “Cooperating with Rossum is a unique opportunity. They’ve built a great team, with big potential. Moreover, the timing is right, with deep neural net technology becoming a game changer.”
When asked about the role StartupYard has played in getting them to this point, Co-Founder Petr Baudis said last week: “StartupYard finally gave us the impulse to really focus on one single thing – we were busy people before, but now we had the reason to finally drop all the side projects for good. We thought the first mentoring month would be the most intense phase, but the pace is only picking up since, and without the “little” pushing by the StartupYard team we would be much more comfortable, getting a good eight hours of sleep a night, but still at the beginning….it surprised us how eager the core StartupYard team was to help with their experience and feedback, these few people really became an important part of Rossum’s story.”
About Miton
Miton, which has backed a string of successful startup projects including food delivery startups DameJidlo (another StartupYard alum from 2012) and Rohlik, e-commerce platform Heureka, the booking platform Hotel.cz, and the popular coupon platform Slevomat, runs a portfolio of investments worth upwards of 10 Billion Czech Crowns (370m Euros).
Many of Miton’s investments are in Czech-specific consumer facing service companies, but they have lately made investments in more globally oriented projects, like innovative payment provider Twisto, the lifestyle ecommerce platforms Bonami and Biano. Rossum represents for Miton a growing interest in deep technology projects, from an investor with valuable experience in brand-building and scaling successful startups.
The feature photo for this post appeared originally on CzechCrunch
