In the AI Startup of the Week, the editorial staff of ai.nl is featuring promising AI startups, their innovations, solutions and challenges. In this twenty-fifth episode, we are taking a look at The Hague-based intelligent content platform Doculayer. The startup began its journey as a technology consultancy firm for enterprises but has morphed to become an AI-powered intelligent content platform.
It is unusual to see a company successfully pivot and Doculayer stands out for its journey. It was founded in 2007 as a consultancy firm for software solutions in enterprise content management. However, the company has evolved to become a disruptive technology company focussing on content platforms.
Onior and early phase
In 2007, Richard Smit founded a consultancy firm for software solutions in enterprise content management (ECM) and called it Onior. As a company, Onior focussed on creating software solutions for managing large volumes of unstructured documents in a user-friendly manner.
However, in 2017, the company began making its pivot towards intelligent content solutions and thus became Doculayer. The company has also grown during these times and now offers a state-of-the-art document intelligence solution. This ten year journey is also the journey of a company transforming from a software services company to a software product company.
What does Doculayer do?
Doculayer solves a pain point faced by every company wanting to become a data company or is already one – turning unstructured data into structured data. It does this by digitising (OCR) documents. It also classifies and extracts data from documents for use within business processes.
In addition to these use cases, Doculayer also offers document discovery features like search and option to anonymous and pseudonymous personal data in your documents. In order to accomplish this, the company relies on a broad array of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies
In order to process unstructured documents, Doculayer relies on AI techniques like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Deep Learning capabilities.
All of these technologies and services are offered as a cloud-native solution and supports the latest infrastructure technologies. The company says this ensures “flexible, cost efficient, and enterprise-grade scalability.”
“With this technology foundation, Doculayer can process large volumes of documents with unparalleled accuracy, regardless of its complexity and variety,” the company claims on its website.
Doculayer Document Intelligence: what is it?
Doculayer Document Intelligence is the platform that turns unstructured data into structured data. It does this by digitising documents and offering automatic document processing. The platform is powered by artificial intelligence and allows automation of document centric processes.
For companies, Doculayer offers a configurable pipeline with document processing services like OCR, document type classification, topic classification, data extraction and data masking. It also puts “business users in the driver seat by making training or learning easy via an intuitive user interface for labelling of documents and data.”
The hybrid data extraction approach means machine learning models can be combined with rules, patterns, and library scripts to obtain better results with less training data in less time. This approach can be described as the unique selling point of the company.
Once the intelligence is generated, Doculayer adds document intelligence to the content services platform, business process management systems, and RPA-solutions. Every company is trying to extract maximum value from the data they already have and Doculayer makes it really easy with a scalable platform and ability to add intelligence. In other words, Doculayer is akin to upgrading your IT environment for document processing with machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision technologies.
A key role in digital transformation
Every company is going through the need to digitally transform themselves. However, not every company is skilled or prepared to make that leap. For many, there is always the need for external support with digital transformation. Doculayer also acts as a partner in the digital transformation journey of many companies.
Dutch Retail Bank (DRB) is using Doculayer to improve customer experience and help its staff. By using Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) software, DRB is able to significantly reduce cost associated with onboarding processes. It is also able to shorten waiting time, leading to better customer experience and reduce loan processing time by up to 70 percent.
With IDP, Dutch Retail Bank is also seeing 80 percent time savings on data analysis and manual input work. In the financial services industry, MN, Caceis are also using Doculayer. The service is also being embraced by KPN to drive its digital transformation and deploying ML technologies to build a centralised digital archive.