Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful capital-efficient entrepreneurship. Where do you want to go from here?

Ike Kavas: We’re in the final stages of Series A. I’d like Ephesoft to remain a technology company and keep innovating. In 2013, we came up with a web service API. It brought new ways of thinking around what we do for our customers. In 2015, we came up with mobile capture where you can actually do your work on the phone offline.

Last year in November, we announced our new edition. It’s called Ephesoft Insights. We have the domain expertise on how to find the data from documents, but there is nothing on earth that can do that on scale and also turn that into data that will allow our customers to do analytics on. It’s actually a Big Data platform that will turn unstructured documents into a structured form and perform analytics on them.

In order to do that at scale, we have to think differently. We developed a machine learning algorithm that will allow us to extract this information from documents. We received the patent for that in early 2016. We have built a brand new product that is adjacent to what we have been doing for the past seven years.

Every time I talk to customers, they have all kinds of analytics software, but nobody can use the data that is being stored in the repository for the past 30 years. When I talk to Bank of America, they say that they have about 20 different repositories and about a hundred billion PDF files. When I talk to Metlife, they say that they receive so many documents from their clients every month that they pay $30 million in storage cost. Nobody is addressing the data in these documents because no one can. We built this platform.

Last year, we went to In-Q-Tel to showcase this, and they became our strategic partner. They have invested in us as well. Our new Insight platform is now used in two agencies. We’re building a new sales team that will allow us to go to the commercial market as well with our new product. This is what I’d like Ephesoft to keep doing.

Sramana Mitra: Let me clarify one thing. It sounds like you are moving up the value chain and the customer base. Are you now working with larger customers?

Ike Kavas: Because this Insight software is new, we are working with larger companies in the beginning. The Insight is designed to be hosted on the cloud which will go down the market. The existing product that we’ve been selling continues to do that and continues to expand. That’s actually going upstream a little bit more. We have Fortune 100 companies that are now interested in purchasing that product. The new product is working the opposite direction it seems.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. That’s a great story. Thank you for your time. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas
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