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A Melbourne-headquartered company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to extract unstructured data from documents is closing a $10 million funding round to invest in its global team, with plans to ramp up its headcount from 65 to 100 in the near term.
The round will take the total amount raised by Affinda over the past 12 months to $22.9 million, representing a valuation of $120 million, with the company backed by a select group of family offices and high net worth investors, including Paul Little AO, Ashok Jacob, Greg Ellis, Craig Bingham, Simon Mawhinney and Mark De Ambrosis.
Affinda was founded by brothers Tim Toner and Dr Ben Toner in 2012, originally focused on the recruitment sector helping companies like SEEK (ASX: SEK) and other large international job boards automatically review and extract candidate information in resumes.
But they knew that similar data challenges existed in a wide range of industries, leading the technology to evolve into an intelligent document processing platform that now services 1,500 customers in 75 countries, among them Toshiba, Siemens, Bloomberg, PwC and LG.
Affinda has witnessed strong demand for its use cases within the financial services, insurance and legal services industries, with the latter prompting the launch of Draftable as a separate business 12 months ago, now with 300 law firms signed up globally.
Christine Christian AO, a seasoned executive and president of the Library Board of Victoria, will join Peter Halstead on the Affinda board following the raise.
"The success of this funding round reflects the value of our proprietary technology and our ability to deliver AI-driven solutions to complex business problems, across a wide range of use cases and industries. We are currently experiencing annual revenue growth of 150-200 per cent," says co-founder and CEO Tim Toner, a former investment banker at Macquarie and Lazard.
"This funding accelerates Affinda’s vision to revolutionise document processing globally. We are humbled by the popularity and success of our products and are thrilled with the productivity and efficiency gains our customers are experiencing."
Co-founder and chief scientist Dr Ben Toner, who has a background in quantum physics with a PhD from Caltech, says AI is fundamentally transforming our world and the pace is only going to increase.
"Affinda's technology strikes a crucial balance, automating repetitive tasks while preserving human judgment where it matters most," he says.
"By continuously integrating cutting-edge AI advancements, we enable our customers to confidently leverage the latest capabilities in document processing, keeping them at the forefront of efficiency and innovation."
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