$12m Series A funding for Anyline [PR]
Only 12 months after Senovo’s initial investment Anyline raised its next round of financing. Well deserved!
Anyline: $12 million Series A funding proves huge untapped potential of mobile Optical Character Recognition
European-born innovation heads across the Atlantic as the latest round of funding brings total venture capital investment to $17 million
Vienna , Austria — 15/01/2020: Anyline, a leading Vienna-based provider of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology working with Toyota, IBM and PepsiCo has raised $12 million in Series A funding to help it to enable more businesses to digitise the real-world.
Leading the round is Project A, the Berlin-based Operational VC, supported by Anyline’s existing investors, including Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, Senovo and the Gernot Langes-Swarovski Foundation.
Businesses are using Anyline technology to scan and collect analog information, such as identity documents, serial numbers and utility meters using any standard mobile device. This brings significant savings in terms of time and resources and improves data-quality for businesses by eliminating manual data entry.
This new capital will primarily be used to double the headcount within Anyline, and to open its first US headquarters in Boston in early 2020. This enables Anyline to bring innovative mobile OCR solutions to new international markets and industries, including smart manufacturing, KYC services and fintech.
“This investment, coupled with the excitement and enthusiasm we have seen from our investors throughout the process, clearly highlights the growth potential Anyline possesses as the market continues to mature,” says Lukas Kinigadner, CEO and co-founder of Anyline. “As businesses move to an increasingly virtual world, it is vital they have access to advanced technologies that enable them to digitise previously analog mediums. We are proud to say European-born technology is helping businesses across the world to reduce the errors, inefficiencies and frustrations that come with manual input. By becoming the market leader in mobile OCR, Anyline plans to be the technology partner businesses need to meet these challenges on the horizon.”
The company was founded in 2013, and offers specialized OCR solutions that the big tech vendors are not set up to supply. This has attracted investment from influential figures including Hermann Hauser, and a portfolio of international clients such as Canon, Porsche and E.On, as well as national governments and the United Nations.
Uwe Horstmann, a partner with the lead funder Project A says: “Anyline offers a superior solution in the computer vision business, valuable to both the public sector and private customers. Apart from their reliable state-of-the-art technology, our decision to invest in Anyline is very much based on their amazing team. We are proud and happy to support Anyline financially as well as with our operational services.”
Kinigadner adds, “W e accept the pressure of European society to grow its own remarkable technology companies which challenge the dominance of other continents. Therefore, A nyline plans to use this capital to develop its proprietary Anyline Platform, a pioneering AI-powered solution that allows our customers to develop their own tailor-made OCR solutions. This frees them from the previously fixed nature of OCR technologies and ensuring its functionality is only limited by their creativity.”
To further enable expansion, the firm has established Anyline Inc. in the US, and has hired Bryan Boatner, the former Global Sales Director of Cognex Corporation, as the company’s new VP of Sales and Business Development.
Boatner says “I am very excited to be joining Anyline, one of the most exciting tech ‘scaleups’ in Europe today as it enters the US market. From my experience in machine and computer vision, I see huge growth potential for Anyline across many different industries, from law enforcement to retail, smart factories and transport, to name only a few. We will be moving fast to build and establish our new US team in 2020.”
ENDS
Editor’s Notes
About Anyline
Founded in Vienna in 2013, Anyline has established itself as the market leader in mobile text recognition. Using the newest and most innovative artificial intelligence approaches, Anyline enables any mobile device to process written characters in real time, even when offline. It’s not only more accurate than manual data entry, but also works 20 times faster.
This allows companies to make significant savings in terms of time and resources. For example, Anyline lets utility companies read meters instantly and accurately, helps police officers to gather data such as driving license, license plate and ID info on the go, and gives logistics companies the power to manage their shipments anywhere in the world.
Recognising Anyline’s place at the forefront of innovation in the logistics sector, the company was named a Gartner ‘Cool Vendor’ in supply chain execution in 2018. In particular, Gartner praised Anyline for its proven ability to increase workforce agility, improve data accuracy and quality across the supply chain, and support the digitization of SCE at every stage.
Press contact
Hotwire for Anyline
Sam Uden | Ed Stevenson AnylineUK@hotwireglobal.com
