As a company, the number of invoices and receipts you have to deal with often grows exponentially with your business activity.

While that's good news on one end, it also means a lot of grunt work and precious human resources being spent on data entry. Which means it's a beautiful use case for automation. And while we might think, "oh just use an OCR for that," it turns out that invoices are so diverse in their formatting, that there's a joke in the accounting community that "reading an invoice is harder than driving a car."

Solving exactly this problem is Paperflow, the company of my new guest, Carsten Nørrevang (thankfully you can learn the right pronunciation of his Danish surname in the episode!) — and I learned some very interesting things through the discussion.

Here's their value proposition in a nutshell: while most OCRs and data capture software can do generic tasks, training a specialized algorithm to read millions of types of invoices is extremely expensive. Carsten said they not only have a team of 30+ people solely dedicated to data preparation but have also built special tools to help mitigate this problem.

What I find really cool is that Paperflow is a really great example of how we can use AI to fix inefficiencies across the entire value chain of today's businesses. Here's what else you'll find in this episode!

00:30 — What Paperflow does, and Carsten’s background as a former CFO
09:00 — Finance teams spend a surprising amount of time on document processing
11:30 — Why Paperflow is named, well… “paper flow”
14:00 — Solving the tough technical challenge of processing invoices
25:00 — The future roadmap: a smart document assistant
30:00 — Competitive landscape in document processing and data capture, and Paperflow’s approach
35:30 — Why banks in the Nordics are under pressure
40:00 — Paperflow’s fundraising journey
44:30 — Carsten’s perspective on going public