New York-based document automation platform Ocrolus says it will ramp up hiring and open a new data quality control facility in Florida after raising $80 million in Series C funding that values the company at more than $500 million.
Ocrolus Inc. said the funding round, led by Fin VC, will allow the company “to more aggressively build products for the mortgage lending and banking industries” and expand its U.S. operations. The new data quality control center in Florida will allow Ocrolus to serve financial institutions and government entities with onshore data requirements.
Having already hired more than 75 employees this year, the company is looking to staff up its machine learning and data science teams. Ocrolus currently lists more than 70 openings on its website in departments including engineering, operations, IT, HR, product, security, and marketing.
Ocrolus says its mortgage technology automates review and analysis of borrower-supplied mortgage documents, onboarding them directly to the loan origination system. The ability to automate document classification, capture key data fields, detect fraud, and analyze cash flows, helps lenders make faster, data-driven decisions, the company says.
Intelligent document processing is a crowded field, with Black Knight introducing a new AI-powered mortgage solution, Underwriter Assist, in July, on the heels of Google Cloud’s April launch of Lending DocAI, which automates data entry and lets lenders create and customize document processing workflows. A recent Everest Group PEAK Matrix report identified 27 technology vendors competing in the space.
But Ocrolus already boasts clients that include financial services firms like Brex, Enova, LendingClub, PayPal, Plaid, and SoFi. The company says it helped partners including Cross River Bank, Square, BlueVine, and Womply process more than 2.5 million Paycheck Protection Loans over the past 18 months.
“While banks struggled to keep up with application volume and ultimately couldn’t service new borrowers, fintechs demonstrated the ability to use software to nimbly flex-up-or-down to meet market demands,” the company said in a statement.
Mortgage lenders need the same flexibility, Ocrolus said, pointing to the recent boom in refinancing that strained the capacity of traditional lenders. A recent survey by ICE Mortgage Technology found half of big lenders still get most mortgage applications on paper.
“Mortgage lenders and banks recognize they need to adopt the same workflow digitization and underwriting automation used by fintech lenders,” said Logan Allin, managing general partner and founder at Fin VC, in a statement. Allin, who is joining Ocrolus’ board of directors, called the company “the category leader in back-office automation.”
The Series C funding round, which brought the total raised to date to over $100 million, also included Thomvest Ventures, Mubadala Capital, Oak HC/FT, FinTech Collective, QED Investors, Bullpen Capital, ValueStream Ventures, Laconia, RiverPark Ventures, Invicta Growth, Stage 2 Capital, and Cross River Bank.