Klippa, a document processing company from Groningen, is expanding its services into the rest of Europe. An investment by NOM provides the sales power required to conquer the European market with their OCR, i.e.: scan & recognise technology. “We want to become the number one document processor in Europe.”
The Netherlands is an important leader in innovation
Bart-Jan Maatman (CFO Klippa) sees the advantages of their team of millennials: “We have all travelled a lot in recent years. To us, Europe feels like one area, one market. Both as a labour market and as a sales market. The Netherlands is a leader when it comes to innovation and technology. The combination of market-leading technology and local expertise ensures that we gain a foothold in the countries around us. In France, Belgium, Spain and the UK, thousands of documents are already processed by our systems every day.” Klippa uses OCR, a technique in which paper documents can be scanned and the data on those documents are automatically recognised and processed. This saves a great deal of time for organisations that have to digitise a lot of paper documents: they no longer have to enter data manually.
Excellent potential
Klippa once started as an app for freelancers. Born out of their own receipt frustration, the entrepreneurs came up with a tool to reduce their administrative burden. But now they have made the OCR technique they developed more widely available and companies can use the technique via their API for receipts, invoices, passports and many more document types. Klippa came into contact with the NOM to find out about financing options. With success. The NOM recognised the excellent quality of the technology and its potential. Klaas Kooistra, Investment Manager at NOM: “Klippa has an excellent and driven team of experts from different fields and their OCR technology is the best in the market. Klippa has the potential to scale up internationally. The market in which they operate already has a reasonable level of competition, but I am confident that they will be able to cope with it.” The new investment allows Klippa to fully focus on growth in sales.
“To really understand each other, you have to speak the language”
Maatman: “Over the past few months, we have expanded our marketing and sales team with internationals. To really understand your customers, you have to speak their language. So, for example, we now employ people from Germany, Spain and Portugal.” This strategy appears to be working, so the first international clients have already signed up. But as far as Maatman is concerned, that’s only the beginning. “Our technology is up and running and ready to scale. There is a lot of interest in the Netherlands, but from the start we have designed everything in such a way that we could easily cross the border as well. Many European countries are far from being as digitised as the Netherlands, but as far as we’re concerned, that’s where the opportunity lies. We are on time and can guide our customers through the process. Not only the quality of your product is important, but also the momentum. And that momentum is now.”
