Google Ventures invests in Ripcord’s paper digitizing robotics service
The $40 million Ripcord Series B we reported back in August has just been bumped up to $65 million, courtesy of additional funding led by Google Ventures. The added funding comes as the record keeping company continues to grow at a healthy clip. The Bay Area based service added 100 jobs this year, and is on track to add another 150 in 2018.
The service came out of stealth in March of this year, when it announced that it had raised a $9.5 million Series A. At the time, it cited billion-dollar enterprise management giant Iron Mountain as its primary competitor.
But Ripcord’s approach to records is purely digital, employing an army of robots capable of pulling out staples and scanning documents at a rate it says is around 10-times faster than humans. It projects to digitize somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million files a day by the end of next year.
The additional funding round will go toward scaling the service’s offerings, as it works to bring more high-profile clients on board. CEO Alex Fielding tells TechCrunch he believes GV took particular notice of the company, given a shared interest in indexing information.
“Google’s motivation for working with us on this round largely surrounded access to information that’s never been available on a search index before,” he said in an interview. “And new and more interesting ways to search content. There is no Google Page Rank for paper, how do you make sense of that stuff when you don’t know who authored it, you don’t know how credible they are, you don’t know what references it relates to?”
To date, the Hayward, Calif.-based service has raised $74.5 million. Google Ventures joins a list of investors that also includes con Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Legend Star, Lux Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Telstra Ventures and Steve Wozniak.
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