Captricity, a startup that helps enterprises digitize their paperwork, faxes, scans, mobile phone photos, and handwriting, is expanding. It hopes to serve more enterprise customers, especially those in the health system including government agencies, insurance companies and health care companies. With that goal in mind, the startup announced a new $10 million round this morning, as well as a partnership with New York Life Direct, a division of the life insurance company New York Life, to digitize a large number of paper-based sales leads. In November, Captricity announced a partnership with the Federal Drug Administration to speed up data entry into FDA’s adverse drug event database.
The road to Captricity’s latest $10 million financing from Atlas Venture began nearly 10,000 miles away in the AIDS clinics of Tanzania. That was where Captricity chief executive Kuang Chen was doing research on data science applications and first confronted what remains a universal problem in both developing and developed countries — a profusion of paperwork. While Chen recognized that paperwork is a necessary evil for any data project not involving a population completely penetrated by high technology, he noticed that some of his assistants had made steps to hack the process, using a mental version of what Chen said was a run-lengths compression. The assistant would make a mental note of the number of “Yes” answers in a survey, and then record all of them at once. What Chen realized was if there was a way to scan documents, and have an algorithm compile affirmative and negative answers and incorporate that into a dataset, it could immensely speed up the amount of time taken to integrate paper data into electronic records, and so Captricity was born. The name is derived from the CAPTCHA technology used to separate humans from robots when logging in to a website, and electricity which is ultimately the life blood of the internet, according to Chen.