Herzlich Willkommen, Hypatos!
We are proud to share with you our most recent investment in Germany: we invested in Hypatos, a deeptech startup that is set to completely transform how finance & purchasing departments of large corporates operate. We closed this investment alongside UVC Partners & Grazia Equity, two well-known early-stage German investors.
Cognitive Process Automation (CPA): understanding data the way humans do.
In line with what Michele outlined as one the major trends we saw at the beginning of 2020 (the digital transformation of the CFO), Hypatos’ technology is an engine that not only can decipher but also understand the contents of any type of semi structured documents (think invoices, receipts, medical prescriptions, purchase orders, payslips etc…). Thanks to the thoroughness and quality of the data extracted, Hypatos enables the automation of tasks that are still performed manually in large shared service centers and usually error-prone.
CPA positions itself as a technology that complements traditional RPA (think UiPath) and process mining (look at Celonis) that have shown how software can successfully identify process inefficiencies and automate mundane, repetitive tasks. The ambition of CPA is to automate processes that require cognitive capabilities (i.e.: human-level intelligence) to be performed successfully and the latest developments in artificial intelligence make this possible today.
Countless use cases across industries & countries make up for a huge global market.
Every company, regardless of country or sector, is impacted at varying degrees by the sheer number of documents it needs to process in order to conduct its operations. Industrial corporations with several thousands of suppliers feel the pain most and have set-up heavily staffed shared service centers in order to perform these tasks in a rigorous way.
But also, in our line of business at BlackFin Tech, financial services & the insurance industry, think of how many documents an insurer needs to understand across the whole journey any claim goes through, think of how many documents a bank clerk or a broker needs to analyze to understand the creditworthiness of a loan applicant. And that is only barely scratching the surface of use cases Hypatos will address as it matures over time.
AI is now sufficiently developed that it can accurately take over the understanding of documents and feed existing software (ECM, ERP etc…) for humans to focus on the more value-added processes.
Hypatos is set up to play a leading role in this new wave of automation
And this is only a part of what attracted us to Hypatos! The company is led by a mix of individuals that jointly hold all the skills required in order to transform the startup into a successful deeptech company. From his years at McKinsey & experience in the startup world, founder & CEO Uli Erxleben brings market knowledge and inspires the vision to his team of talented people. Among them is Cem Dilmegani, who also brings market knowledge and understanding of AI-enabled process automation. He Zhang is the mastermind behind Hypatos’ actual artificial intelligence — building on both his academic expertise and previous startup experience. With all these minds put together, it is not surprising that a cutting-edge AI startup could come out.
In short, this combination of i) a stellar team, ii) a robust and scalable technology already deployed with blue chip clients across several industries incl. automotive, financial services, insurance mining & construction as well as mass retailing, and iii) such a large and varied market opportunity convinced us to join the round. We look forward to working with Hypatos’ team and our two coinvestors to make sure it becomes a household name in enterprise AI software worldwide.
So, welcome to the family, Hypatos! We’re excited for what is to come and we can’t wait to get started!
