Exclusive Talk with Yeelen Knegtering: CEO at Klippa

Q1: Tell us about Klippa’s journey so far. Can you shed some light on some of the key problems that Klippa addresses?

Yeelen: Back in 2015, I was a self-employed entrepreneur, and I was working as a consultant. In both jobs, I saw how much time was spent on administrative tasks: doing your tax filings, registering your hours, approving invoices, all these kinds of tasks. I wondered why we have so many repetitive tasks that limit us from doing important things. Why couldn’t this be automated? 

I saw a lot of administrative work that nobody wanted to do. Still, you have to do it because of legal obligations: because of tax obligations or some kind of workflow within a company. We started Klippa to help companies and people automate administrative tasks so they can spend their time on more important things. 

My employer at the time was one of our first clients. They realized that if they automated some of these procedures, their consultants could spend more time with clients. Time with clients is where the money is made. Our business model is focused on saving time and reducing turnaround times in these procedures so you can spend more time doing the things that generate revenue.

Q2: How is Klippa using artificial intelligence to make intelligent document processing solutions?

Yeelen: Our space is called the IDP or intelligent document processing space. What it basically does is try to mimic the human understanding of documents or other types of files. So we use artificial intelligence to understand:

• The appearance of what a document or image looks like 
• What does it actually say? (What is on this document, and what is its meaning?) 

That combination helps us to automate certain tasks such as sorting documents, extracting certain information from documents into certain files, detecting fraudulent activity in documents, and more. We try to implement human understanding of documents and images into our solutions to allow automated decision-making.

Q3: Tell us about your IDP solution Klippa DocHorizon.

Yeelen: Klippa DocHorizon is a platform you can use as an API or an SDK. You can integrate a platform into your own workflow, your own software. Klippa DocHorizon does everything from scanning, uploading, or emailing documents to understanding that document and extracting certain information, classifying it and grouping it into certain categories, and verifying it for third-party sources. 

For example, we take an invoice to extract the Chamber of Commerce number and the VAT number. Then, we actually verify with third-party sources whether that information is valid. Does this company exist? Is it actually registered at that address? Then we convert that information into a software format that our client needs. For example, a JSON format or XML or CSV file. We turn unstructured information into structured information with all the steps in between. Most of our clients then integrate that into their software solutions.

Client using our software mainly come from the following key verticals:

• (1): Accounting and ERP industry: 
  • Companies selling bookkeeping or ERP software.
  • Use case: use it to automate receipt and invoice flows (basically Accounts Payable automation).
• (2) Loyalty and retail space:
  • Companies that collect receipts, price tags, and all kinds of information about store purchases.
  • Use case: to understand people’s behavior and in-store pricing.
• (3) KYC (know your customer) industry: 
  • Companies that need to verify the identities of their clients, such as banks, insurance companies, and car rental companies.
  • Use case: where you have to send in, for example, a passport, driving license, or an ID card to verify that you are you. 

Q4: The automation industry is seeing the rising importance of Big Data and AI. How do you see these emerging technologies impacting the Document Processing solutions sector?

Yeelen: A high volume of documents is being processed worldwide; billions of documents are probably processed daily. These are the receipts that you receive, the invoices that you receive, the contracts that you sign and the salary slips that you get. Daily, you probably touch ten documents or more, whether that’s private or within a company. 

Document processing is a field that is very applicable to using AI because there is such a large volume of available data. At the moment, probably 30% of the industry has some kind of automation around the document flows. Every year, this is growing by at least 10%.

Q5: What are the key points to consider when selecting an IDP solution?

Yeelen: When selecting an IDP solution, I think one of the core components to look at is how integratable it is. Can you integrate it with your existing solutions? Or is it a standalone solution that is not integrated? We believe that in the current day and age, any good software solution has API’s, and you can integrate one solution with the other. Almost every big company and also smaller companies have multiple software solutions. Services should be able to integrate with each other. 

For cross-border companies, it’s also very important to look at the language capabilities of IDPs. IDP solutions usually have some language limitations. Some solutions are only capable of processing in Dutch or German or French. It’s important to look at solutions that have cross-border capabilities. If you do business cross-border, which is very common in Europe and other places around the world nowadays, make sure your solution is not too limited. You want to confirm that it can support you in all your business endeavors now and in the future. 

It’s also very important to look at solutions still in development. It’s risky in software to buy a solution at some level where further developments are limited. You need to find software that is still being worked on a daily basis. You want to know that you are buying a solution that is future-proof. You’re not buying a solution that was created ten years ago. Make sure you have vendor software that has new releases every week, month, or quarter. This is very relevant so that you know that what you are buying stays up to date and is improved regularly. This is because the market is growing so fast, and the software industry is changing so fast.

Q6: Can you give our readers some tips to ensure they trust their documents to the right partner?

Yeelen: Documents can contain sensitive information, so assessing vendors’ security policy and hosting possibilities is important. Specifically in the European Union, for example, GDPR is relevant, so we need to find a partner to host your data within the European Union. But you also need to find a partner that has regular penetration testing and good internal security policies that limit their data storage. 

For example, we don’t do any data storage. We only do data processing to reduce the risks of potential data leaks. I think those are the points you should look at when looking at potential IDP partners. You should always test solutions in real life. Use real documents, test them, try them out, see the accuracy of the solutions, and then go into buying. I would never advise anyone to buy software without doing a test run. You don’t buy a car without doing a test ride at the car company. So why would you buy software without testing? 

Q7: Can you tell us about your funding status and revenue? Where are you standing right now?  

Yeelen: The software landscape has changed in the past few months due to major economic changes. It’s very nice to see now that profitable companies are still growing rapidly, and are more respected now than before. We pride ourselves on being one of those profitable companies. We are still able to grow by 100% every year without any additional funding.

Thanks to Klippa for the thought leadership/ Educational article. Klippa has supported this Content.

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