by Samra Anees
AppZen, a San Jose based AI company, announced today that it closed a $50 million Series C round of funding, after having raised $35 million less than a year ago and bringing its total funding to over $100 million. AppZen is an AI provider that automates and streamlines expense auditing for finance departments. This blog explores AppZen’s offering as well as how it fits into the trend of image analytics for claims processing use case.
AppZen, a San Jose based AI company, provides an automation solution for finance departments.
AppZen Is Innovating with Its AI for Auditing
AppZen’s platform automates expense management and overall financial processes by identifying errors, waste, or fraud in company expenses while complying with corporate policies and contracts. It integrates with finance systems to audit company documents, like expenses and contracts, and crosschecks these documents with the company’s policy. Risk scores are assigned to each transaction to help audit expenses faster.
AppZen uses document analytics, image analytics, and deep learning to mine documents and compare them to expenses.
AI and Image Analytics for Automating Processes
Image analytics, a subcategory of Intelligent Content Analytics (ICA), is gaining momentum as new use cases emerge; such as the use case of leveraging image analytics technology for claims processing, risk assessment, auditing, and anti-fraud. This is a growing area where image analytics can heavily impact the efficiency and productivity of a company by automating processes that usually take hours of manual labor by humans. Image analytics can make this formerly unstructured content structured, and automate the cycle of processing claims and forms, making image analytics an area to watch.
Will the Accounting and Audit Market Automate?
To date, the large $160 billion accounting and audit market has largely been manual and unautomated. AppZen marks a shift in what we think is the beginning of a trend to automate the manual audit process. Just as e-Discovery helped the legal market, it appears that automating the audit process will save audit firms lots of time.
Bottom Line
Image analytics is growing as its own market outside of ICA as its use cases expand—especially in back-end processing tasks. While not the most glamorous application of AI, the ability to automate and speed up and ensure efficiency in processes like claims processing, expense reports, etc., can potentially have a huge impact on businesses. Aragon will be releasing research on the ways image analytics is helping to automate business processes.
Related Research
Aragon Research Technology Arc for AI, 2019