Investing in More Than Just Robots

Today we announced our Series B funding round of $40M led by Icon Ventures with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. Since Ripcord launched in March, some of the world’s largest companies have been requesting our services for digitizing their records. Now we have the funds to meet their demand by expanding our fleet of robots, further developing our ‘Ripcord Canopy’ software, and growing our team by over 100 new employees in 2017. We are also pleased to welcome Icon Ventures General Partner, Jeb Miller, to the Ripcord Board of Directors. The next year will be exciting and challenging and we do not doubt that Jeb’s expertise will be a major asset in navigating our endeavors.

The History of Canopy

When we first came up with the idea for Ripcord, we thought that maybe we would be just a robotics company. We would hand off the digitized records to other service providers, who would provide the software. But when we started talking to potential customers, we discovered that their digitization workflows were so complex that sometimes they never got their digitization jobs off the ground at all. Time and time again we heard about companies spending millions, years and countless man-hours on digitization projects that never came to fruition, and that required multiple vendors. The more vendors they contracted with to do a job, the less successful they were at completing the project. We quickly realized that we should be a robotics company AND a data company. So we set out to simplify the process of managing records, from end to end. To do that, we needed to create a unified records management platform.

Creating Ripcord Canopy

Everyone should have the tools they need to securely access any record, anywhere, at any time. Providing this level of access was our goal when, last year, we brought Mike Moskwinski on as our Chief Architect. Our focus was, and continues to be, to create a simple online record management platform, with three core capabilities:

1. The ability to search quickly and effectively through large volumes of records.
2. Secure records sharing with the ability to set permissions globally or at the time of sharing.
3. Simple, push-button integration with the enterprise apps that already used.

As we highlighted in this morning’s announcement, Ripcord Canopy now features:

• Advanced search to save time hunting down specialized or obscure records.
• Integrations to common ERP, CRM, HRIS, and eDiscovery platforms.
• Artificial intelligence functions including auto-classification and anomaly detection
• Robust compliance and records management tools to satisfy regulations across multiple industries.
• End-to-end records security, to protect sensitive information and notify customers of anomalies.
• Blockchain-based chain of custody and provenance to assure indelible evidence of every record accessed, shared, or deleted.
• Advanced tools to assist companies with GoBD and litigation hold notices.

Thank you to the entire Ripcord team and our investors for making today a reality!

You can check out the media coverage of our big announcement below:

• TechCrunch - Ripcord’s $40 million Series B will pay for more file digitizing robots and human jobs 
• VentureBeat - Robotic digitization startup Ripcord raises $40 million to make paperless offices a reality