A well-funded startup in the crowded AI-based document automation market, Hyperscience, is targeting growth in the A/NZ region following an alliance with Israeli RPA and Process Discovery vendor Kryon.

With regional headquarters in Singapore, Kryon has just announced a win to automate Accounts Payable and HR business processes for Thai company CP All which operate than 12,000 7-Eleven e stores in the country.

Launched onto the market in 2018, Hyperscience offers a machine learning (ML)-based Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) platform.

Max Lien, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Development at Hyperscience, told IDM, “Our key imperative is to grow internationally, working with strategic partners, and with the benefit of $US140 million venture capital funding in the past 12 months, you will see more of us in your neck of the woods.”

Australian systems integrator Reveal Group, now operating internationally, is one local partner for both Hyperscience and Kryon.

Robotic Process Automation, the automation of repetitive tasks that historically have been done by humans using software scripts, is growing at a rate of 60 to 70 percent annualy.

RPA is expected to have a breakthrough year in 2021, with some industry experts predicting nearly 20 percent growth globally compared to 2020.

Companies usually get started using RPA to help with back-office processes. Those types of tasks automated by software bots are typically very deterministic and structured. 

“RPA is strong in taking data from one system and inputting it into the next, when they look at extracting data from images or scanned documents they struggle,” said Lien.

Based in New York, Hyperscience has been developing its own ML-based capture and workflow solution since 2014, which it describes as based on field-level rather than character-level recognition.

“All of our technology is proprietary, there is no OEM or white labelling 3rd party OCR engines which historically others have done,” said Lien.

“We can process the kind of documents you find in the real world with handwriting or poor scans or pictures taken from phones. Legacy approaches don't solve this well.

“Typically, we can automate 75-80% of processes on Day 1 and as our ML sees more and more of documents over time gets smart about when it will be right or wrong. The automation rate increases to 90% plus.”

The partnership with Kryon adds Process Discovery, which identifies and analyses processes that are ripe for automation and turns them into automated workflows, assigned to a Kryon Robot for execution.

“Kryon is always open to partnerships with innovative companies that can remove the barriers to successful automation deployments,” said Daniel Peled, senior vice president of Channel Sales at Kryon.

“Reliably and efficiently extracting critical data locked in unstructured document formats is one of those common barriers that only Hyperscience can solve at scale. By combining our two powerful solutions, Kryon and Hyperscience create even more value for our shared enterprise customers, helping them deploy automation more quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively.”

Kryon also offers integration with ABBYY’s document automation engine to increase the usability of RPA, enabling the automated processing of unstructured documents such as invoices, purchase orders, PDFs, emails and more. With this integration, unstructured data is transformed into standardized formats which are readable by Kryon robots.

“Enterprises deal with an extraordinary amount of unstructured content, typically trapped in documents and images,” said Hyperscience’s Max Lien.

“Data automation is the critical step zero of any business process, and enterprises are using the Hyperscience Platform to transform how they use data, make business decisions, and structure their operations. The need for enterprise automation has never been greater, and with our recent Series D financing, we will accelerate our international expansion and ship continued innovation. A key pillar of this entails working with strategic partners like Kryon to enable more enterprises to unlock the benefits of automation to better serve their end customers.”

Thailand’s CP All used Kryon Process Discovery to identify that there were more than 200 processes ripe for automation. While unattended bots are already deployed in the accounting and HR departments, as well as in the distribution centre, in the near future CP All also plans to add attended bots and Hybrid automation to help 7-Eleven retail employees provide a better customer experience in-store.

"Full-Cycle Automation is the exact technology our organization required to solve problems with our business processes. We discovered which back-office processes had the biggest drag on productivity, and then implemented the right level of automation to improve upon the 'old ways' of doing things," explained Phairach Watcharatangtrirong, Assistant Vice President of Accounting Retail for CP All.

"Because of the speed at which we were able to discover and automate these processes, we are already seeing immediate benefits from RPA. So far, we have already automated several internal processes, and our goal is to scale up and deploy an additional 10 bots by the end of the year."

In an example of one automation deployment, the process of invoicing vendor partners in CP All's Accounting department involved manually searching, collecting, and inputting data from multiple systems on a daily basis. Since CP All works with more than 3,000 suppliers, handling these invoices manually took four to five hours each day from all six department employees.

Today, a bot runs behind-the-scenes each day, extracting data from the company's SAP system and consolidating the payment information into a single Excel file. It takes less than one hour per day to complete, and the number of employees needed to handle the task reduced from six workers to three.