In his earlier days, Alberto Gimeno probably did not even contemplate that he would be building a company that would process millions of invoices, receipts, and business documents one day. The 30-year-old Spanish entrepreneur has built something that most people barely even think about, but is something that practically every business needs: a way to make sense of the endless paper trail that gums up the works of modern commerce.

This company that Gimeno built, Invofox, now has servers that work on untold billions of documents every month, with each one processed without a single human touch. “We apply cutting-edge AI to a universal and persistent problem: extracting structured data from unstructured documents, with a clear use case, strong customer demand, and high ROI,” Gimeno explains. What started as a technical challenge at first has become a $3 million annual recurring revenue business that processes tens of millions of documents yearly for over 100 software companies worldwide.

From Mathematics to Market Reality

Alberto Gimeno’s path to the document processing business began in the lecture halls of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he pursued dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science. While his classmates focused on theoretical problems, Gimeno was already building his first startup during university, gaining hands-on experience in the messy realities of business operations. His early ventures, from a social network for urban athletes to a hardware security company, taught him that the most valuable solutions often address the most mundane of problems.

A massive realization came during his seven-year tenure as CEO of Kinequo Technologies, where he witnessed firsthand how document processing bottlenecks practically strangled business efficiency. Companies would hire entire teams just to manually enter data from invoices and receipts, a process that is prone to errors and delays that had a ripple effect throughout entire supply chains. Gimeno saw that artificial intelligence could eliminate this human drudgery entirely, but only if the technology could handle the chaos of real-world documents, including crumpled receipts, poorly scanned invoices, and files corrupted during data transmission.

Building Infrastructure for the Hardly-noticed Dilemma

Invofox operated in the background of the software economy, powering processes that users never get to see but businesses could survive without. When an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system automatically processes supplier invoices or a payroll platform migrates employee data from a previous system, Invofox‘s algorithms are hard at work behind the scenes. The company has built what Gimeno calls “document processing infrastructure”, a suite of pre-trained AI models that can parse invoices, payslips, utility bills, and purchase orders with accuracy that surpasses human data entry.

The technical challenges encountered by the company are formidable. Invofox’s system must handle file splitting, automatically separating multiple documents within a single file, while simultaneously scoring image quality to reject unusable scans. The platform runs multiple AI models in parallel, comparing results to catch errors that would cost customers thousands of dollars. Data verification algorithms check whether tax calculations are correct and autocomplete missing information, such as vendor addresses not specified on invoices.

“Most importantly, we specialize in servicing other tech companies, which means that we’ve built features in our product, processes in our company, and acquired knowledge and experience in our team that is extremely relevant to any software company that needs to deal with this problem,” Infovox cofounder Carmelo Juanes notes. This focus on serving other technology companies has allowed Invofox to develop specialized capabilities that generic document processing services cannot match.

The Expansion to Another Country

Alberto Gimeno’s decision to relocate to San Francisco in June 2024 marked a crucial moment for Invofox’s growth trajectory. The American market presented both an enormous opportunity and a slew of significant challenges, including different regulatory requirements, varying document formats, and established competitors with deep pockets. The company spent a full year adapting its product and sales processes for the U.S. market, but the investment is paying dividends as American clients like Scripta Insights, aACE, and Repositrak begin processing documents through Invofox’s API.

The expansion reflected Gimeno’s broader vision for Invofox as the infrastructure layer for document automation in the global software economy. Just as Stripe became the invisible backbone for online payments and Twilio redefined business communications, Invofox aims to become the standard for document processing. The company has raised $11.2 million from European and American investors, enabling rapid scaling across multiple continents while maintaining the technical excellence that attracted its first customers.

Gimeno’s journey from mathematics student to infrastructure entrepreneur illustrates how the most transformative businesses often emerge from solving problems that few people thought to address systematically. “Our goal is to become the go-to infrastructure layer for document automation in the software economy“, Gimeno states, pointing out the fact that in a world drowning in paperwork, this is a goal that feels less like ambition and more like necessity.