We are very excited to announce the closing of Ocrolus’s $24 million Series B financing led by Oak HC/FT with follow-on support by Laconia, Bullpen Capital, QED Investors, ValueStream Ventures, and Differential Ventures. We were introduced to Ocrolus in the summer of 2017 by Nick Adams of Differential Ventures. Ocrolus is a New York City-based fintech infrastructure platform that automates the analysis of digital documents and financial data. By eliminating manual review, Ocrolus empowers companies to reinvest their human capital and automate processes with industry-leading speed and accuracy. Ocrolus services hundreds of customers in the financial sector and analyzes millions of transactions every day with 99+% accuracy.
The company was in our sweet spot from the moment we met their CEO, Sam Bobley. It had been seed funded primarily by friends and family, allowing Sam to build a strong founding team with a product solving a large TAM manual workflow problem. When Sam first sat down with us, he was looking to raise $750K. His pitch was very compelling about digitizing what heretofore was a high pain point manual workflow: the processing of financial services applications. Ocrolus was a big idea and it quickly became apparent to us that a much larger capital raise was needed.
Sam and Vik were very responsive and transparent throughout the due diligence process. Diving into everything from the company's financing history to their plans for improving unit economics to even introducing us to Sam's father, an entrepreneur himself & a trusted advisor to Ocrolus, we felt we were building a true partnership with the team. Our collaborative inclinations have few boundaries!
Sam had raised a fair amount of seed capital, so his cap table had unusual complexity to it. We rolled up our sleeves, sifted through the company's finances, and came up with a structure that would permit increasing the initial $750K Sam sought to a proposed $3M-$4M round. Indeed, over the next few months, a first class group of syndication partners concluded Ocrolus’s $4M financing in January of last year.
It was then off to the races. Ocrolus’s rapid year-to-year revenue growth has been sensational. Sam, Vik, and the team have built a product that checks all of the boxes: strong market fit, sound tech, tremendous scalability. They are also amongst the most intense and driven leaders we have encountered. They actively solicit and listen to all of their investors and then are quickly decisive once the facts and opinions have been satisfactorily gathered. They are also very loyal, always making sure their investors and employees are respected in any decision being made.
Sam and Vik embody the Laconia DNA. Congratulations to them and their entire team!
For more details, see their feature in Venturebeat.