Staff at a California school district reportedly spent 20% of their time searching for lost documents until they retained the services of a records management company. It's not a unique problem -- the average manager spends four weeks out of the year looking for records, by some estimates.
In search of a solution five years ago, three entrepreneurs -- NASA veteran Kim Lembo, former Apple senior engineering scientist Alex Fielding, and Kevin Hall -- cofounded Ripcord, a startup developing a portfolio of robots that can digitize paper records. Fresh off a series B funding round, the Hayward, California-based company today announced it has raised $45 million in series B funding, bringing its total raised to over $120 million ahead of a planned global expansion.
Automotive marketplace software developer CDK Global led the round, ostensibly to further its mission of streamlining the car buying experience by reducing errors and costs at dealerships. "CDK Global's mission is to help dealerships improve the customer experience in a digital-driven world, and Ripcord's intelligent approach to digitization supports our vision and benefits both dealerships and consumers tremendously," said CDK president and CEO Brian Krzanich, previously the CEO of Intel. "CDK processes about 65% of the nation's auto loans annually. Ripcord will help us meet data compliance demands while eliminating outdated, cumbersome processes to bring the car buying experience into the modern era."
Ripcord processes over 1 billion pages per year for customers like Coca Cola, BP, Chevron, MUFG Bank, UCLA, Cantium, and a number of Fortune 100 companies -- including three of the top five financial services companies and three of the top five insurance carriers. The company develops physical robots that autonomously scan documents, even removing staples. Courtesy of partnerships with logistics firms, Ripcord transports files containing barcoded labels with metadata to its facilities, where it scans them and either stores them to meet compliance requirements or shreds and recycles them. Fees start at around $0.004 per page, per month.
