Ocrolus, which claims to be the only automation platform that analyzes financial documents with more than 99% accuracy, reveals that it has finalized an $80 million Series C round that was led by Fin VC at a $500 million+ valuation.
Ocrolus powers document workflows for innovative financial services companies such as Brex, Enova, LendingClub, PayPal, Plaid, and SoFi. Ocrolus intends to use the proceeds to develop more products for the mortgage lending and banking sectors and to expand its US operations.
Ocrolus has emerged as the “leading Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) document processing and automation solution with full-stack capabilities: to classify financial documents, capture key data fields, detect fraud, and analyze cash flows, enabling lenders to make faster, data-driven decisions.”
The announcement also mentioned that before the COVID-19 crisis, less than 1% of loans in the world were being facilitated in an online environment. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, demand for digital lending technology among traditional financial services companies has “accelerated dramatically.”
The update from Ocrolus also noted that as the Coronavirus has forced financial institutions to evolve, “every lender and bank has no choice but to offer online options to customers.”
“Our platform helps lenders automate underwriting and intelligently leverage cash flow and income data for credit scoring,” stated Sam Bobley, Co-founder and CEO at Ocrolus.
Sam added that by enabling lenders to quickly analyze various sources of financial data, Ocrolus “levels the playing field for every borrower, providing expanded access to credit at a lower cost.”
Back-office scalability and flexibility have “become increasingly important for lenders over the last 18 months,” the release noted while adding that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was created to “urgently pump money into the economy, but it was also an opportunity to see fintechs and banks compete for market share.”
Although banking service providers have been struggling to keep up with application volume and were not able to effectively serve new borrowers, Fintechs “demonstrated the ability to use software to nimbly flex-up-or-down to meet market demands.”
Ocrolus worked closely with partners like Cross River Bank, Square, BlueVine, and Womply to handle more than 2.5 million PPP loans, serving a key role in helping small businesses across the country “keep the lights on.”
A similar requirement for operational elasticity has “emerged in the mortgage industry, where favorable rates caused a spike in application volume, stretching traditional lenders to their limits and propelling tech-forward lenders who employ automation to create a streamlined customer experience.”
Logan Allin, Managing General Partner and Founder at Fin VC and new Board member at Ocrolus, stated:
“Mortgage lenders and banks recognize they need to adopt the same workflow digitization and underwriting automation used by fintech lenders. We’re excited to support Ocrolus, the category leader in back-office automation.”
Having onboarded over 75 corporate team members this year, Ocrolus intends to further ramp-up hiring into 2022, “with a focus on its machine learning and data science teams.” The firm is also “opening a new data quality control facility in Florida to accommodate financial institutions and government entities with onshore data requirements.”
Additional participants in the round included Thomvest Ventures, Mubadala Capital, Oak HC/FT, FinTech Collective, QED Investors, Bullpen Capital, ValueStream Ventures, Laconia, RiverPark Ventures, Invicta Growth, Stage 2 Capital, and Cross River Bank.