【Maki-chare2023 Commemorative Interview | Staple】 Staple – A novel method for document digitization
Makinohara City, which is located in the Shizuoka prefecture of Japan, organised a contest for start-ups in October 2023. The contest, titled as “Makinohara-shi Challenge Business Contest” (Makichare 2023), provided a platform for aspiring entrepreneurs to present innovative ideas. This was the second contest of its kind held in the city.
In Makichare 2023, startup companies from all over the world presented their ideas and business plans to address market gaps in the local community by utilising the “industrial resources” and “tourism resources” of the city. EXPACT CEO, Mr. Takachi participated as a judge in the second edition of the contest.
In this article, we interviewed CEO Ben Stein of Staple, one of the finalists in Makichare 2023, about the service they provide and his perspective towards Makichare 2023 and the future plan in the Japanese market.
ーThank you for your time today.
Thank you.
ーFirstly, what does Staple offer?
Staple can read, interpret, extract and match data from a range of document types, regardless of layout or language. Our solution helps companies in their journey towards automation of organizing any format of documents including PDFs, excel files, images, photos, XML files and Word documents.
Most other services only automate a process unless data the customer is dealing with is structured, however, the majority of data that enterprises deal with today is actually not in that format. It’s in unstructured format, and you need humans to convert that data in a structured format that can then be automated so that is the area we want to solve through our service. We will process that and convert it into a way that can be structured and then automated.
Not only do we structure data, but also we reconcile data. We look for anomalies or inconsistencies in groups of data or groups of documents that should be consistent, such as logistics documentation and your shipment documentation. Staple can check whether you’re receiving the correct volume and quantities of data.
ーIt’s a very unique service and the process of structuring data sounds helpful for all companies that want to save time and human resources.
Besides the automation of documents without structuring data by humans, what are Staple’s differentiation points from other competitors?
Regarding how we differentiate ourselves, we have developed our solution to really service the Asian market first. The reason is that many solutions that we compete with are built on traditional OCR or traditional machine learning methods that were trained in English.
But, our solution supports 190 languages today and for that reason, we can help organizations who are truly global in their scope. A lot of our competitors don’t support that range of language capability and also the various documents that you encounter from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Moreover, Asia is the largest geography in terms of GDP and population, but it’s the most fragmented in many respects. Every country has a slightly different way of doing things, particularly in terms of business and we help to offer our customers one single solution for all their global needs as opposed to one tool for North America, one tool for Japan, one tool for India.
This is why CFOs, CTOs, IT directors like working with us, for all their needs, not just language, but also any document type which are invoices, logistics documents, KYC, onboarding documents, certifications and compliance documentation. So, Staple is one single tool for all of these requirements.
ーWhat kinds of companies or sectors is Staple looking to?
A: The simple answer would be any organisation with very document heavy data intensive workflows. In truth, I think every company in the world has this problem to varying degrees. We particularly focus on the large enterprise organisations down to mid-market companies who have very high volumes of documentation and data to handle daily.
We also focus on multinational organisations, for the reasons I mentioned our solution appeals to organisations that really transact across borders, so large organisations who trade internationally.
In terms of the sectors, we service sectors such as financial services and insurance, primarily because they have to deal with their high documentation requirements around policies and claims documents.
The other side of it is also organisations that operate in high transaction volume of physical goods such as consumer packaged goods, food, beverage, industrials and manufacturing. Those sectors I’ve mentioned are probably the bulk of our revenue today as they ship a lot of physical items from point A to point B and with those shipments come a lot of documentation to manage logistics and stocks.
That’s where our solution does well, because we match those kinds of quantities, unit descriptions, components parts, finished goods to make sure that customers are receiving or transacting in the correct quantities that they’ve ordered.
ーCan you tell us what kinds of feedback you have received from those customers and how it has changed their general documentation processes?
There have been some examples where we’ve been able to reduce the number of staff involved in this kind of work, but, that’s not to say we’ve contributed to reducing the size of the workforce. It’s usually reassigning or redeploying those people onto roles or tasks or activities that are much more high value or much more customer-oriented. So, these are actually positive outcomes for many companies to effectively assign human resources.
In terms of customer reviews, we actually expected some resistance from potential customers when we introduced our product. Despite the expectation, they welcomed our solution because structuring documentation is the kind of work that staff are expected to do, but they don’t necessarily get much recognition for. Therefore, Staple can change the work routine which allows staff to do things that earn recognition or praise from their supervisor while our software completes the documentation process. So, this is something we were surprised about in a good way.
ーFrom global customers, is there any positive reaction towards Staple service? And what is the latest function that customers appreciate?
Absolutely. In other parts of the world, there’s a customer who operates right across Asia. They have operations in 11 countries in Asia, but they were not able to find a solution that could handle all the languages that they were dealing with including places like Cambodia, Thailand and Taiwan. All these different locations have to be done manually because the solutions that they found could only service one or two countries, not all 11.
But with Staple, they could use one single solution and we could help them with all their different needs. One very attractive part of that was being able to consolidate all those operations into one single data source and it enables reporting to management, through one tool.
A recent benefit we’ve also delivered is the ability to converse with document and data repositories. Now users can query their document repositories using our solution across 190 languages, not just English, and we’ll be able to fetch that data and give the documentation that supports the answer as well. This also helps with intelligence and analytics in order to facilitate swiffer decision-making.
ーWhat inspired you to launch Staple？
Based on my own experience, I worked at KPMG for around nine years and on different teams, and I also worked as a CFO for a mid-sized company that was expanding globally.
One of the mechanisms by which we did that was to consider offshoring which takes some repetitive but necessary tasks and moves them to a cheaper jurisdiction. It is quite a common practice and the challenge that we encountered was that we established teams in some low-cost jurisdictions and the teams processing those documents were very capable in English and their local language as well.
But as soon as they started receiving documents, then in Korean and Japanese and Romanian and Spanish, this became very challenging to find the people to do that processing. While also keeping the costs down because suddenly you’re looking to hire very skilled multilingual people that are going to be quite expensive regardless of where they’re based. So, this was a little bit of a challenge as suddenly the argument of geo arbitrage starts to erode and it’s very difficult to justify this if the people that you use to process these documents can’t handle all those languages. So that was the challenge we were seeing and then.
Also, it wasn’t just about processing documents, also about reconciling data points and checking the data consistency from various data sources, and this was something that we saw lacking in a lot of the existing tools.
ーWhy was Singapore in particular chosen as the headquarter location of Staple?
We chose Singapore as our HQ because the co-founder and I were based in Singapore at the time of incorporation. It was also the location of our first investor.
We also saw that Singapore is quite centrally located, geographically as a port city. Although the official language is English, there’s actually three other languages that are widely spoken, and it was a nice place for us to prove and validate our problem statement and also demonstrate our USP so that’s part of why we set up here.
Staple at Makinohara-Shi Business Challenge Contest (Maki-chare)
ーWe assume Makinohara-shi (Shizuoka Prefecture) is not a well-known city compared to Tokyo or Osaka for non-Japanese companies, but why did you participate in Maki-chare?
The reason for our participation was in line with our strategy in the Japanese market. We knew at the time that many organisations fit into those key market sectors, such as Shizuoka Bank, Suzuki, and Mizuho Home Construction. We want to focus on these organisations, and we also think it’s worthwhile to pursue these opportunities when governments support the introductions. Therefore, we considered it a good way to reach the market and suitable for market exposure in Japan.
In addition, we are looking at investing more in the Japanese market and setting up operations there at some point. But it’s always helpful to test the market and see what kind of interest from these potential customers or organisations.
ーSome of the other finalists of Maki-chare have mentioned that they focus on developing their solutions for regional area issues, but do you have any further plans for expanding our business in the Japanese regional area?
One of the other reasons why we’re interested in Makinohara-shi is the agricultural element. So, we do have some customers in the agriculture space as well because they do have large volumes of documentation that accompany the movement of physical goods or products. So the tea industry in Shizuoka is quite large and this is something we consider to focus on in Makinohara-shi.
We are also looking at other markets in Japan like Tokyo and Osaka, but we have yet to commit to any particular location for any office. We have secured partnerships with some organisations in Japan, so one of them being SAP, we work with them in Japan and help them deliver to Japanese customers. However, we have also started working with Japanese partners such as system integration and software development companies. So we are looking to collaborate with them further, and they cover the Shizuoka region and Tokyo. So, we are very interested in both regional areas of Japan, such as Makinohara-shi and the big Japanese cities.
Staple’s future
ーLet’s move forward to more future-looking questions of Staple.
Recently, there have been certain global macroeconomic and geopolitical risks and a bit of a shortage in general investor confidence that have some substantial headwinds in the startup ecosystem. In such a market situation, Has Staple changed its approach to three parameters: the fundraising plans, business operating model and growth strategy?
In terms of the fundraising plan, we’ve been fortunate enough to fundraise right now, so we are in the late stages of closing our latest round, but the conditions are obviously quite dire for startups right now. No one is really investing actively, particularly in high-risk investments like in venture, but we were fortunate enough to secure funding late last year.
The reason why we could do that was because despite challenging economic conditions, we could demonstrate very strong unit economics, growth and very versatile and flexible deployment of our solution, so being a cloud solution, we can install our solution anyway. So, we still proved to be an attractive investment.
I think if you can show these things in some ways, it’s easier to stand out in a very down market or a very protracted investment market, so that worked in our favour.
We are planning to use this funding to acquire more customers, explore new markets, expand existing markets, such as in Japan and also enhance our existing features and potentially build new features as a part of our growth strategy.
ーFor a business operating model, will you focus more on generating profits or general growth of Staple?
We actually did have our first profitable quarter last year, and it’s likely to be our last for some time after receiving investment, as there’s an expectation to use that investment money to spend more and grow more aggressively. So, we will prioritise growth at least for the next 12 months.
That’s nothing really to do with the business model, the economics or unit economics, it’s more the fact that we have investment that we intend to use for growth. However, the fact that we were able to achieve profitability last year shows that our model can be profitable. We just need to tweak the various levers to make sure that we can generate a proper result in the long term. We will see whether we should do things more efficiently or reduce our marketing or spending on other activities. We have demonstrated that we can be a profitable business and I’m sure we will return to that point probably in 12 to 18 months.
ーI look forward to Staple’s continued success in the Asian market, and hope that their market
entry strategy for Japan is a resounding success. The solutions provided by Staple form a cornerstone of DX (Digital Transformation) in the modern workplace.
[Company overview]
【Name of company】Staple AI Pte Ltd
【URL】https://staple.io/
【Date of company establishment】Oct 30, 2018
【Representative】Ben Stein
【Location】38 Maxwell Road, #03-04, Air View Building, Singapore 069116
Interview Conducted by Pramod Sharma & Kanako Hara
Written by Pramod Sharma & Kanako Hara
