Veryfi: The untapped potential of unstructured data
By Jazmin Medina and Nick Bunick | Apr 26, 2021
Today, NewView Capital is proud to announce that we led Veryfi’s $12M Series A round and will be joining their board.
Veryfi is tackling a huge problem for organizations today with their suite of data transformation APIs. Approximately 80% of an organization’s entire data set consists of unstructured data. Yet, many companies can’t leverage this information today due to the constraints of conventional systems which are not able to analyze the complexity inherent in unstructured data.
We believe Veryfi is poised to usher in a new wave of data enablement, allowing companies to transform unstructured data into valuable business intelligence in seconds. Their AI-based platform is designed to securely capture, extract, and transform unstructured data to offer companies a highly accurate, out-of-the-box solution. Veryfi’s platform is already driving significant value for companies across expense management, bookkeeping, accounts payable, B2B payments and other financial services verticals.
At NewView, we are passionate about backing companies that are focused on unlocking the power of data. We have seen first-hand the value this delivers to entire ecosystems through our engagement and investments in Plaid, Forter, Segment, and MessageBird, and Braintree and Mulesoft at prior firms. We believe in the great potential of the Veryfi team and are honored to have them continue their journey as part of the NewView family.
The Challenge and Opportunity with Unstructured Data
Today, enterprises across all industries are investing tremendous amounts of capital to leverage structured data—and for good reason. In 2017, Forrester estimated that “just a 10% increase in data accessibility will result in >$65M of additional net income for a typical Fortune 1000 company.” (1)
The amount of data created every year is also staggering. IDC projects the collective sum of the world’s data will grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025, a 65% compounded annual growth rate.
More than 80% of the data generated and collected by organizations is unstructured in the form of emails, PDFs, and other business documents. In fact, this unstructured information is growing at a much faster rate than structured data. (2)
While unstructured data represents a tremendous opportunity for businesses, it also presents significant challenges. Items like receipts and invoices often change structure over time and tend to differ across companies, making them difficult to process. As a result, many existing solutions have low accuracy rates and often require human analysis to fill in the gaps. While there are merits to the “human-in-the-loop” approach, it is often slower, less secure, more expensive, and difficult to scale.
This is a particular pain point for companies operating in the financial services sector, where data privacy is paramount and regulatory hurdles amongst banks and governments continue to drive paper-based documentation. For these reasons, there is still a massive amount of unstructured data in an offline, inaccessible state:
- Only 10% of the 550 billion invoices processed globally each year are paperless, with no sign of slowing down. The volume of invoices processed is expected to increase 4x by 2035 (3)
- More than 40% of B2B payments in the US are still made by paper check (4)
Veryfi’s Solution
Veryfi is focused on helping organizations transform their unstructured data in the form of receipts, invoices, purchase orders, checks, and W2s into structured data at scale. Customers can leverage Veryfi’s suite of data transformation APIs for a variety of use cases across expense management, bookkeeping, accounts payable, B2B payments, and more.
Veryfi has pre-trained their models over 3 years with a large, highly variable dataset, leveraging AI to support the rapid and secure transformation of unstructured data. This early investment in technology is one of the key strengths of the Veryfi platform, allowing them to offer an out-of-the-box solution that is:
- Fast, with no humans-in-the-loop
- Secure, with bank-grade security and compliance
- Scalable, with no templates required
- Highly accurate, leveraging AI and machine learning
- Powerful in its ability to extract line-item data (commonly referred to as level III data)
Extracting level III data (such as discount amounts, item descriptors, product codes, and quantities) is particularly impactful for B2B payment companies. By unlocking access level III data, Veryfi empowers its B2B payments customers to (1) pass transaction information to payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, (2) pay lower interchange fees (up to 30% less for Visa), and (3) lower the risk of fraud associated with processing payments.
The Journey Ahead
As we work with the co-founders of Verify, Ernest Semerda and Dmitry Birulia, we are consistently impressed by their dedication and the genuine excitement their customers have about the Veryfi platform. Veryfi’s fast-growing customer list includes leading VC-backed tech companies and large enterprises that offer financial services and tools. They have already helped more than 80 companies extract meaningful business insights, reduce friction in their workflows, create more transparency in their ecosystem, and build best-in-class products and experiences.
We are proud to be supporters of Ernest and Dmitry’s vision, and believe the Veryfi team is just getting started in their journey to help organizations tap into their unstructured data.
If you’d like to explore Veryfi’s technology, you can test it here via their free trial.
Veryfi is also actively seeking amazing talent. If you’re interested in joining the team, please explore their open job opportunities here.
2. https://www.mongodb.com/unstructured-data
3. https://compacer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Billentis_Report_compacer_single-sponsor.pdf
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