This article was published in August 2022 when Taiger first joined Percent’s platform. For the latest and critical updates regarding Taiger’s performance, including any recent developments or changes, please visit Taiger’s borrower page on Percent.
Taiger, a Singapore-based enterprise software solutions and services company, recently joined the Percent platform as the latest entity to raise corporate debt. We sat down with CEO and Founder Sinuhé Arroyo to talk about this exciting announcement and Taiger’s work in automatic data processing.
How did Taiger begin?
Taiger began as an academic spin-off of my PhD in Artificial Intelligence. Back in the day, my research was focused on advancing the ability of software to understand meaning. This was the foundation to what Taiger and Omnitive IDP are today.
We started by attracting R&D funds to build prototypes and start early commercialisation. Once our technology and solutions were validated by early customers, we progressed to Series A fundraising and the rest, as they say, is history.
What was the need for IDP in 2016 (when you started) compared to today?
The need remains the same. Automated document classification, reading, and date extraction. Or, in a nutshell, converting a document into a set of data-points available in a database.
While Taiger largely operates in the F.I. and Legal sectors, the need for IDP exists in virtually every sector, spanning from pharma to manufacturing and trade finance. The common denominator is that a tremendous amount of specialized staff are devoted to manually processing documents and extracting key pieces of data, frequently dealing with the complexity of the language and variability of documents’ layout.
With Omnitive IDP, any person with basic literacy and computer skills can build a document reading model in minutes that understands meaning regardless of layout.
How does Taiger’s proprietary technology advance the fields of machine learning (ML) and automatic data processing?
Ominitive IDP is unique in that it has broken many of the A.I. barriers that held the industry from truly scaling. As you know, anyone with basic literacy and computer skills can successfully build and put to work a document reading model with Ominitive. It requires few samples (around 50) to build a performing model. ) It is also document and language agnostic, supporting 150 languages as of today. Due to these and other features, we are in a unique position to massively and rapidly scale.
What are the biggest needs and use cases for IDP that you’re seeing with clients?
It all revolves around automation of tasks that, today, computers are better at doing than humans. Things like document classification and data extraction. These can be applied to literally any industry. We are, however, focused in FI and Legal. There, we see a lot of demand in loan origination and review, proof of underlying for trade finance, and annual statements for hedge funds.
We can read virtually any document — from a simple ID card to balance sheets, board resolutions, or powers of attorney. Once the data is structured and available in a database, it can be used for any purpose that the business demands.
How does OmnitiveIDP allow people to use such advanced technology with no computer engineering experience?
Simplicity. We built a tool that democratized A.I. by hiding all the complexity. That was the only way to make it scalable.
The algorithms in the background are groundbreaking. It took us several years and iterations — not to mention a tremendous economic investment — to achieve this. Yet the user experience is simple and straightforward. There is no need to understand complex A.I. concepts of mathematical formalisms. We take care of all that under the hood.
We are extremely proud of bringing this technological breakthrough to the market, and hope to do it at scale and rather quickly.
What is something you wish more people knew about the IDP and ML market?
The here and now readiness of Omnitive IDP to put the power of business back into the business owner’s hands. With this solution, business leaders no longer require armies of engineers to access the data that remained locked in semi and unstructured documents. By unlocking the many critical data points that have been trapped on paper for too long, business leaders can now make decisions faster enabling higher quality growth, increased competitiveness, and reduced costs. With Omnitive IDP, the AI industry has crossed the chasm where data can finally be accessed and used with speed and simplicity.
When are you expecting to raise a Series C and what would be the expected size and Use of Proceeds?
We are expecting to raise our Series C in the second half of 2023, with proceeds being used to continue to drive innovation leadership as well as accelerating market adoption globally (with particular emphasis on the U.S.) over the coming 18 months.