Groningen-based Klippa is slowly but surely taking its first steps outside the Netherlands. An investment from the NOM provides clout in sales and the owners are aiming to conquer the European market with their OCR, or scan & recognize technology. "We want to become the No. 1 document processor in Europe," he says.
Netherlands important leader in innovation
Bart-Jan Maatman (CFO Klippa) sees the benefits of their team of millennials: "We have all traveled a lot in recent years. For us, Europe feels like one area, one market. Both as a labor 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 will gain a greater foothold in the countries around us. In France, Belgium, Spain and the UK, our systems are already processing thousands of documents a day." That system is a technology where paper documents can be scanned in and the data on them is automatically recognized and processed. That saves an awful lot of time for organizations that need to digitize many paper documents: they no longer have to enter data manually.
Excellent potency
Klippa once started as an app for self-employed people. Born out of their own frustration with receipts, the entrepreneurs came up with a tool to ease their administrative burden. A picture of a receipt and then automatically in the administration, without having to retype all kinds of data: that would give a lot of peace of mind. But now they have made the OCR technology they developed more widely available and companies can purchase the technology separately in an API. Klippa got in touch with the NOM to explore funding opportunities. With success. NOM recognized 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 reasonable competition, but I am confident that they can cope with it." The new financial space now puts Klippa fully committed to growth in sales.
"To really understand each other, you have to speak the language."
Maatman: "We have expanded our marketing and sales team in recent months with internationals. To really understand each other, you have to speak the language. So we now employ people from Germany, Spain and Portugal, for example." That strategy appears to be working; so the first international customers have now signed up. But as far as Maatman is concerned, that's just the beginning. "Our technology is in place and ready for scaling up. There is a lot of interest in the Netherlands, but from the beginning we have set everything up in such a way that we could also easily cross borders. It is sometimes a search; many European countries are nowhere near as digitized as the Netherlands, but as far as we are concerned, that is precisely where an opportunity lies. We are now on time and can guide our customers through the process. Not only the quality of your product is important, also the momentum. And that momentum is now."
Learn more at the Klippa website.