October 28, 2021
Our Investment in Ocrolus and the Future of Lending Data
The recent explosion in fintech has been driven by shifting market dynamics. On the demand side, consumers and businesses increasingly expect connected, smart, personalized services. On the supply side, the number of companies providing core financial infrastructure via APIs has grown larger and more competitive. As a result, it has never been easier or cheaper for fintech upstarts to build and scale innovative products.
One such infrastructure provider – Ocrolus – offers a suite of tools to enable fintech companies, banks, and multi-asset lenders to mine, classify, and analyze unstructured data, often pulled from printed documents. Ocrolus powers some of the leading companies in fintech (including Plaid, Brex, and PayPal), enabling challengers to offer seamless, tech-first products and meet market demand in an industry characterized by stacks of paperwork.
During the pandemic, Cross River worked tirelessly to deliver aid to hundreds of thousands of small businesses, processing a massive volume of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) applications to provide more than $13 billion in aid. To process such a high volume of PPP applications, Cross River leveraged Ocrolus’s solution to extract data from documents with a high degree of automation and accuracy, enabling us to process loan applications in as little as 8 minutes.
As such, we’re pleased to share that Cross River (via Cross River Digital Ventures) has expanded our partnership with Ocrolus, participating in the company’s Series C funding round. Ocrolus is exactly the type of company that we at CRDV look to fund and partner with – one focused on enabling the digital transformation of the financial services industry.
Our team was impressed by our conversations with Ocrolus’s CEO, Sam Bobley, who had a powerful, clear vision for how the company will enable companies in the verticals that it serves going forward. We were also impressed by the organization that Sam has been able to build, which now includes industry veterans with strong backgrounds in financial services and technology strategy.
At Cross River, we are believers that the future of financial services lies in seamless digital-first experiences. The team at Ocrolus shares our vision and we believe that they will continue to provide a best-in-class solution enabling intelligent document processing for the fintech industry. We are excited to deepen our partnership with Sam and his team and look forward to years of fruitful collaboration ahead.