Anyline nabs $20M to automate mobile information capture for enterprises

Anyline, a firm that builds mobile information capture and scanning technologies for numerous industries, has raised $20 million.

Founded out of Vienna, Austria, in 2013, Anyline has created a variety of information capture merchandise such as barcode scanning, optical character recognition (OCR)-powered document scanning, biometric face authentication, serial quantity scanning, and even driving licensing scanning which enables retailers to very easily confirm a person’s age and identity at the point-of-sale or curbside pickup.

Elsewhere, police forces can integrate Anyline’s technologies to scan all manner of IDs and car license plates to confirm drivers instantaneously, which not only speeds points up but also reduces the probabilities of errors by means of conventional manual processes such as typing or broadcasting information across radio.

This, according to Anyline CEO and cofounder Lukas Kinigadner, is possibly the quantity one advantage Anyline brings to organizations across the spectrum.

“At its core, Anyline makes data capture simple for enterprises by removing the need for manual data entry,” Kinigadner told VentureBeat. “The first key benefit of automating data entry is process optimization, as businesses can do away with paper-based systems and digitally transform their data entry. This also vastly improves enterprise data quality, as in general, humans are terrible at writing and typing information.”

It’s also worth noting that for organizations concerned about transmitting confidential information to third-party servers, Anyline supports information collection on-device and offline.

Growth

Anyline, which claims 250 consumers from across the private and public sectors like PepsiCo, Edison, and Swisscom, has been doubling down on its worldwide expansion efforts of late. While its official HQ remains in its native Vienna, Anyline opened its U.S. headquarters in Boston last year following closing its $12 million series A round of funding, then earlier this year it expanded into the U.S. retail sector. According to Kinigadner, U.S. small business now accounts for about 40% of his company’s income.

With an additional $20 million in the bank, Anyline is improved positioned to compete against other nicely-financed competitors such as Scandit, which closed a $80 million financing round last year. But more importantly, it is now nicely-financed to capitalize on a demand that has gone by means of the roof more than the previous 15 months, driven in aspect by the fast uptake of contactless technologies due to the COVID-19 crisis — this has been especially pronounced in hospitality, with hotels leveraging Anyline’s ID-scanning smarts to allow contactless verify-ins, when retailers as well have been keen to embrace Anyline.

“Over the past 15 months, demand for mobile data capture solutions has surged across multiple industries,” Kinigadner explained. “The surge in popularity for socially distanced retail experiences, including curbside pickup, scan-and-go and click-and-collect, also drove demand from retailers for mobile scanning technology.”

Since its last raise, Anyline also launched Anyline Trainer, which tends to make it simpler for providers to train their personal custom OCR program “in hours” by uploading their personal set of instruction image.

Anyline’s most recent money injection was led by Digital+ Partners, with participation from Project A, Senovo, Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, and Push Ventures.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz