Handling paperwork isn’t exactly the most complicated aspect of a company’s operations, but it consumes a lot of person-hours that could be spent on more productive activities.

New York’s HyperScience Inc. believes that the answer is artificial intelligence. The startup exited stealth today to pursue its vision for automating document management and announced the completion of a $18 million funding round that will help fuel the effort. TechCrunch reports that the investment came courtesy of Felicis Ventures and FirstMark Capital, an early backer of several notable tech firm including Pinterest Inc.

HyperScience will use the capital to spread the word about its line of artificial intelligence tools for processing paperwork. The first is called HS Forms and, as its name suggests, focuses on documents such as regulatory filings that are organized into fields. According to the startup’s website, its algorithms can glean the contents of each table with “better-than human accuracy” and quickly load the data into the appropriate system.

Companies that process a broader variety of content can use HyperScience’s complementary HS Freeform tool. The software serves the same basic purpose as HS Forms but goes a step further and groups documents based on their contents to spare back office personnel the hassle of manually organizing files.

Users can automate tasks such as filtering duplicate entries thanks to HS Evaluate, the third the startup is offering on launch. It’s the most sophisticated of the trio thank to a built-in historical analysis mechanism that learns from the data it process to become more over accurate over time.

HS Evaluate also can apply the experience that it gains to a wide range of areas. HyperScience claims that the tool can make decisions about the eligibility of customer requests and other complex subjects that have historically required careful assessment from a human administrator.

Image via Pixabay