Docugami, a startup founded by ex-Microsoft executives, scores $10M seed funding to transform how businesses create and manage documents

For years, IT experts promised technology would solve the world’s information management problems, but 85% of business information is still “dark data,” potentially useful insights lost in a rising tide of disconnected documents, emails, Slack conversations, voice-to-text messages, and myriad other forms. One startup is on a mission to fix the document dysfunction. Enter Docugami, a Seattle-area document engineering startup that transforms how businesses create and manage documents for greater productivity, compliance, and insight using breakthrough artificial intelligence.

Today, Docugami announced it has secured a $10 million seed funding round led by Silicon Valley venture fund SignalFire, with participation by NextWorld Capital and others. The $10 million seed round announced today brings Docugami’s total amount raised to $11.7 million, which includes $1.7 million in pre-seed funding provided by the founders. In conjunction with the funding, Docugami also announced that Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and former head of both Microsoft’s Office and Azure businesses, is joining the company as a major investor and board member.

The seed round also includes a number of notable angel investors in Silicon Valley, Paris, and the Seattle area, including: Thomas Reardon, co-founder of CTRL-Labs; Ellen Levy, former head of corporate and business development at LinkedIn; Sarah Imbach, former senior executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, and 23andMe; Hank Vigil, former senior vice president for strategy and partnerships at Microsoft; Marc Jalabert, former executive at Microsoft Western Europe; and Sunil Chhaya, a Silicon Valley angel investor.

Founded in March 2018 by former Microsoft executive Jean Paoli and four other senior engineering leaders from Microsoft, Docugami harnesses a wide range of artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, image recognition, declarative markup, and other approaches, to enable businesses of all sizes to radically improve how they create and manage documents for greater insight, efficiency, and business impact.

Unlike other companies that require expensive and time-consuming machine learning on massive sets of big data, Docugami focuses on the “small data” that is unique to each company. Docugami’s breakthrough solutions do not require customers to implement expensive new systems or change their business processes; instead, they are designed to work seamlessly with customers’ existing systems such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. More information about Docugami’s vision and approach is available in an open letter to the industry.

“SignalFire’s deep technical roots and hands-on approach are a great fit for Docugami,” said Jean Paoli, chief executive officer of Docugami. “We are on a mission to solve the document and dark data issues that have plagued businesses of all sizes for decades, and this massive infusion of seed funding will enable us to expand our data science team to add product capabilities, and build our sales and marketing muscle to rapidly grow our customer base.”

“Bob Muglia has an extraordinary track record in our industry, first in his 20-plus year career of leading the Office, Azure, and Server & Tools businesses at Microsoft and more recently in building Snowflake from a tiny startup into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse,” Paoli said. “We are excited to have Bob’s insights and experience as Docugami embarks on a period of rapid customer growth and technical innovation.”

“We are excited to be making such an unusually large seed investment because we are so impressed with the world-class team of engineers, data scientists and business leaders Docugami has assembled,” said Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and chief technology officer at SignalFire. “The Docugami team helped create and deliver the document technology used by more than a billion people around the world today, and they have the vision and experience to transform how people use and think about documents for the next 20-30 years.”

“Over the coming decade, artificial intelligence will transform every industry. Business documents are the lifeblood of every company, yet today they are opaque to business systems and require constant interpretation and translation by frontline staff, legal professionals, and others,” said Muglia. “Docugami is poised to redefine the process of business document creation and management, unlocking the information in those documents, and enabling executives and frontline employees to focus on what matters most to the business.”