In May of 2024, Alberto Gimeno made a decision that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier: he packed his bags and moved from Madrid to San Francisco, leaving behind the familiar startup ecosystem of Spain for the hypercompetitive world of Silicon Valley. The 32-year-old CEO wasn't chasing the typical Silicon Valley dream of disrupting social media or creating the next consumer app. Instead, he was betting that American software companies would trust a Spanish startup with something far more valuable: their customers' most sensitive business documents.
Gimeno's company, Invofox, processes over tens of millions of documents annually for more than 100 software companies worldwide, transforming chaotic stacks of receipts, payslips, and purchase orders into clean, structured data that powers everything from automated accounting to inventory management. In an era where artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize every industry, Invofox has quietly become the infrastructure layer that makes document automation possible, a role that Gimeno believes could be as transformative as Stripe was for online payments or Twilio for communications.
"AI is rapidly evolving, and companies around the world are racing to define the business models of the future," Gimeno explains, "Invofox applies 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."
The Unlikely Problem That Powers Modern Business
The challenge that Invofox takes on represents one of the most persistent friction points in the digital economy. Every day, millions of businesses exchange critical information through documents, invoices that need to be processed for payment, payslips that must be digitized during employee onboarding, mortgage applications, and utility bills that require data extraction for expense management. For software companies building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, payroll solutions, or lending solutions, the ability to automatically parse these documents is not just a nice-to-have feature; it often marks the difference between a manual, error-prone process and true automation.
Traditional optical character recognition (OCR) technology can read text from documents, but it struggles with the nuanced task of understanding context, validating information, and handling the countless variations in document formats across different countries and industries. Invofox's approach goes far beyond simple text recognition. The platform validates fields, autocompletes missing data, and catches costly errors using what the company describes as a combination of advanced AI models and proprietary algorithms.
"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," Gimeno notes. This focus on serving software companies rather than end consumers has allowed Invofox to develop highly specialized capabilities, including a scalable ingestion system capable of handling millions of documents in short periods, sophisticated pre-processing AI that can split files and classify document types, and support for multiple AI models that can be deployed based on specific customer needs.
From Madrid to the Rest of the World
Armed with dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Alberto Gimeno spent nearly seven years working with a web development company focused on data science and artificial intelligence. Along the way, he co-founded several startups, including a book rental service and a hardware security company that developed panic buttons with mobile app integration.
The experience of building and sometimes failing with these ventures provided crucial lessons that would later influence Invofox's strategy. "We started our first business together in 2015, launched different products with different degrees of success, and that experience helped us eventually start building Invofox," Gimeno reflects. When he and co-founder Carmelo Juanes finally launched Invofox in 2022, they brought a decade of entrepreneurial experience and a clear understanding of what software companies actually needed.
The validation came quickly for the company, as later that year, Invofox was accepted into Y Combinator's prestigious accelerator program. The Y Combinator experience not only provided crucial mentorship and networking opportunities but also helped Invofox refine its pitch and business model for the American market. Since then, the company has raised over $11 million from European and American investors, including Rebel Fund, JME, YC Continuity, and 4 Founders, along with business angels like Matt Robinson and Stefan Lederer.
Promoting Trust in an Age of AI Anxiety
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Invofox's growth is how it has convinced software companies to entrust their customers' sensitive financial documents to a relatively young startup. In an era when data breaches make headlines and privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) impose severe penalties for mishandling personal information, the decision to integrate a third-party document processing service into critical business workflows requires significant trust.
Invofox has addressed these concerns through a combination of technical excellence and regulatory compliance. The platform is certified for regulations in both the EU and the USA, and the company has developed what it calls "seamless integration" through APIs and webhook systems that allow customers to quickly incorporate document processing without exposing sensitive data unnecessarily. The company's global compliance framework and focus on serving other technology companies have helped build confidence among potential customers.
The results speak to the effectiveness of this approach. Invofox now processes millions of documents annually and has achieved over $3 million in annual recurring revenue, growing at more than 10 percent month-over-month. Notable clients include Aon, Cegid, Docuten, Holded, and Quantum, though many others remain confidential due to the sensitive nature of the integrations.
The Validation of Vision and Hard Work
Alberto Gimeno's move to San Francisco represents more than just geographic expansion; it signals Invofox's ambition to become the global infrastructure layer for document automation. "With Invofox, we've raised over $11 million to date from some of the best European and American venture capitalists and business angels," Gimeno says, "our goal is to become the go-to infrastructure layer for document automation in the software economy."
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape how businesses operate, the companies that succeed will likely be those that solve fundamental, persistent problems rather than chasing the latest technological trends. In focusing on the tedious but essential task of document processing, Gimeno has built something that software companies did not even know they desperately needed.
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