A2iA Acquired By Management Team And Two Capital Partners
A2iA, one of the world's two leading developers of advanced software applications for cursive handwriting and handprint recognition, today announced that it has changed ownership. President and CEO Jean-Louis Fages, chief technology officer Olivier Baret and A2iA's management team, together with French venture capital firms Développement & Partenariat and XAnge Capital, have acquired the company. Fages and Baret elected to involve key personnel within the management team, who together now hold 30 percent of the capital. A2iA was founded in 1991 in Paris by the late professor Jean-Claude Simon, a pioneer in natural handwriting recognition. Prior to this transaction, the company was held by Simon's family and capital firm Eurazeo. A2iA software is being successfully used on five continents.
"I am very pleased to have completed the acquisition of A2iA with Développement & Partenariat and XAnge Capital. The new shareholding structure gives us the capacity to both continue and accelerate the company's development," said Jean-Louis Fages. "Partners, integrators, resellers and end users will likely see very little, if any, change in the day-to-day operation of A2iA. However, behind the scenes, those who run the company, who understand the technology, who know our partners and customers best will be the ones to make the decisions and provide the follow-through necessary to maintain our forward momentum. We are excited that this acquisition is being finalized as we're entering our fifteenth year of business."
D&P's decision to invest was guided by the consistency of A2iA's check recognition business growth (backed by A2iA's impressive list of global client references) and by the promising outlook for the development of closely-related recognition applications. "We were impressed by the company's directors and the cohesiveness of the management team that now has a stake in A2iA's capital. A2iA is our first technology investment. As with all of our equity holdings, we will call upon our entrepreneur-shareholders to assist the company with strategic considerations," said Christophe Dantoine, associate director of Développement & Partenariat.
"We were primarily impressed with the timeliness of the A2iA technology. Character recognition, which is a key field in terms of document processing, is one of our priority investment targets. A2iA will strengthen our portfolio in this area, particularly because its Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR) technology exceeds the capabilities of traditional character-based recognition engines. A2iA fits in perfectly with our strategic orientation of offering support to technology companies in their growth stage," said François Cavalié, managing director of XAnge.
Jean-Claude Simon, professor emeritus of University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, was a pioneering researcher in the field of Intelligent Character Recognition. His desire to transform a field of fundamental research into concrete business applications led him to make a career change and become A2iA's founding director in 1991, at more than 60 years of age. A2iA set up an intensive research unit, which has been managed since Simon's death by his two closest associates, Jean-Louis Fages and Olivier Baret.
The first field of application developed by A2iA was in the banking sector, for the recognition of amounts written on checks. The company developed software that could read both the long-hand (legal) and digit-only (courtesy) amounts on handwritten and machine-printed checks. Today, A2iA CheckReader is an "entire-check recognition" application, capable of locating and reading all fields found on checks. It is quickly becoming a key component of distribution capture-enabled systems for U.S. banks and corporations, as well as the backbone of new fraud detection systems.
In 2000, A2iA continued its policy of innovation with the launch of A2iA FieldReader, an integrated tool dedicated to the recognition of handwriting on structured documents – particularly the processing of business and administrative forms, purchase orders, surveys, etc. A2iA FieldReader clears the path for a wide range of applications where the automatic extraction of form data allows paper-intensive businesses to dramatically reduce their reliance on manual data entry, and thus reduce their labor expenses and processing times while increasing the accuracy of the collected information.
Since 2003, A2iA has been investing in the postal market and has gained a firm foothold in Europe for the sorting of incoming, outgoing and internal mail. A2iA AddressReader, first launched in April 2004, can locate and recognize handwritten address blocks on envelopes and other flat mail pieces. It manages all writing formats and is designed to meet the needs of large corporations, public organizations and national postal services for optimal mail management.
In June 2005, A2iA broke new innovative ground with the launch of an automated data capture and keyword spotting tool for freeform cursive handwriting. A2iA DocumentReader makes it possible to quickly scan through the content contained within large volumes of unstructured handwritten letters and loosely structured fields within forms, and transcribe cursive handwritten text into actionable data. The result of five years of research and development efforts, A2iA DocumentReader is rooted in A2iA's strategy of empowering a new generation of applications that enable businesses to gain access to information that hasn't been available in electronic form and to streamline critical business processes. A2iA DocumentReader enhances mailroom and mail processing, content management, knowledge management and workflow systems.
Today, A2iA is truly international in scope. Thanks to the dynamic leadership of its management team, A2iA software applications are now available in 20 country-specific versions and in 6 languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian).
About A2iA Corporation
A2iA (Artificial Intelligence & Image Analysis), founded in 1991, headquartered in New York and Paris, is known as the worldwide leading developer of Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR) technology for extracting information from natural freeform and cursive handwriting on paper documents. The company's technology has been helping paper-intensive industries reduce data entry costs and improve business process automation for 15 years. A2iA's recognition engines harmonize their OCR, ICR and IWR technologies with their image analysis, artificial intelligence and neural network systems to enhance solutions from the world's leading systems integrators and other independent software vendors. For more information: www.a2ia.com.