In recent months, we have kept a low profile with news about our company. So, now it’s time to share what has been going on. This article is the first one in a future series giving you an update on what and how we are doing.
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The past 10 months
We founded Parashift with the aim to develop the technology to enable fully autonomous processing of accounting processes on a large scale to eliminate unpleasant, tedious and repetitive manual work. Our strategy is to gradually develop individual components of this solution and establish them on the market with partners. It’s a “marathon” to accelerate a paradigm shift in the way accounting is done.
One of the most important components in this puzzle is the autonomous processing of accounting documents. The processing of these receipts is currently also one of the largest expenditures in the mix of work necessary to accomplish accounting. It therefore makes sense to work on it.
After Jan-Hendrik and I made
Accounto (our other Start-Up) operationally independent in December 2017, there was enough room to further develop the technology and to build a first product. In recent months, the entire machine learning infrastructure for document extraction has been created. It’s a comprehensive application that enables us to quickly implement and combine new machine learning methods and ideas. On the other hand, it also provides a sophisticated backend for our document annotation team. Since the beginning of the year, this team has processed thousands of documents, implemented QA processes and thus ensures that we have one of the most comprehensive and, above all, perfect annotated data sets including nominal account entries for learning purposes. This data pool grows hourly.
The first product: The Parashift Extraction APIs
At the same time, we have built the
three APIs available today. Now we are about to create the billing process and the self-service token generation for the API product. The APIs are interesting primarily for integrators, BPOs, ERP manufacturers, etc. In order to have good requirements/product fit, these customers should already have a volume of > 100k documents per year.
At the same time, we were able to win the first customers with whom we are in the process of realizing corresponding products and components. The exchange with customers is great and we look forward to seeing our technology in action like little children.
Seed Financing
In May we were able to secure a seed financing of CHF 1 M to further invest in the technology and products. With this money, we are about to expand the team and strengthen ourselves on all fronts.
The second product: Parashift Platform
In June, the question arose whether the API would generate enough traction in business to help us with further financing and we realized that there was a risk that the sales cycles with the API product might be too long.
That’s why we decided to start implementing the product called
Parashift Platform. The first version is a SaaS tool for medium-sized companies with which you can easily digitize, organize, release and process documents in a previously unknown way. It enables every company to bypass repetitive manual work such as typing or checking accounting documents for a small fee.
The Parashift Platform kills several birds with one stone: it is quickly ready for use (a matter of hours), does not come with a high license fee, delivers not only “some” automation, but real autonomous automation, enables the quick finding and organizing of documents and ensures the save and secure archiving of documents.
In short: Parashift Platform offers accounting departments the radical relief they deserved a long time ago. And a turnkey solution for digitizing accounting documents.
We will probably start with the first customers in December or early 2019. If you want your company to be there from the very beginning, just write to me.
New Office
We also moved into a new office at the beginning of October. Over the past few months, we have worked practically chair to chair on around 75 m2 (20 m2 of which were meeting rooms). At times it seemed as if we were in a small space station. Things stowed away and crammed in everywhere. The new offices are almost 5x larger and now offer space for further expansion of the company. In addition, they are also nice for welcoming customers and interested parties. A small video will follow in the next days.
Current challenges for Parashift
Our current main challenge is clearly to move from being a technology-oriented organization to becoming a sales organization. Parashift Platform (as well as the APIs) is an internationally scalable product that we design with exactly this in mind. We are therefore in the process of compiling the requirement profiles for our sales and business development team. If you have experience in scaling a B2B software product and countless European contacts into medium-sized and larger companies – and are looking for a huge international challenge – I would be very pleased to meet you.
