Berlin-based Cloudsquid secures over €900K to address document processing challenges in Europe | EU-Startups

Cloudsquid, a Berlin-based platform specializing in AI-powered data extraction and integration, secured a close to €1 million pre-seed funding round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds and Backbone Ventures, with additional support from angel investors Reetu Kainulainen, founder of Ultimate AI, and Udi Miron, VP of Product at Ultimate AI. This funding will help Cloudsquid develop tools aimed at simplifying data extraction from complex, unstructured documents using Generative AI.

Founded in 2023, Cloudsquid provides a platform for building unstructured data pipelines, allowing technical teams to prioritize product functionality rather than data integration. Co-founders Filip Rejmus, Sangwoo Bae, and Mike McCarthy bring backgrounds from companies like Taktile, Uber, AWS, and Kubermatic, with a shared goal of unlocking the potential of unstructured data for a range of businesses.

Over 80% of enterprise data remains in unstructured formats, including documents, emails, CSVs, and images—posing challenges for businesses needing efficient data management solutions. Cloudsquid’s API is designed to transform these unstructured files into structured data, enabling integration with downstream systems such as databases, ERPs, and CRMs. This solution aims to reduce the need for manual data processing, helping technical teams focus on other tasks.

Mike McCarthy, Cloudsquid Co-founder and CEO, said: “Working closely with these organizations has been eye-opening. Whole teams of people are spending the majority of their workday transferring fields from PDFs into back-office systems. It’s a huge waste of potential amid Europe’s skilled labor shortage. AI can solve these legacy bottlenecks quickly, and we are able to help these companies skip a few steps forward on the digitization journey immediately.”

Rather than building a specific SaaS application for certain workflows, Cloudsquid’s co-founders Sangwoo Bae and Filip Rejmus take a broader approach, focusing on addressing data challenges at the infrastructure level. “We spoke with many product teams working to build similar AI functionalities in-house and found they often faced critical last-mile challenges with accuracy and reliability that stopped them from going into production,” Sangwoo explained. “Creating an AI pipeline from scratch that processes complex documents at scale, designing interfaces to refine and test prompts, and implementing essential features like observability, is an impractical undertaking that’s leading to months of wasted effort and failed projects.”

Currently serving a range of clients from startups to established enterprises, Cloudsquid will use the new funding to expand its engineering team and advance its platform. The company plans to roll out a General Availability release and a Freemium plan by the end of 2024, aiming to make its platform accessible to a broader audience.

Björn Sykora, Principal at HTGF, said: “Cloudsquid is transforming how companies deal with their unstructured data, bringing much-needed ease of accessibility to all kinds of industries. Mike, Filip, and Sangwoo are an outstanding team, and we are excited to support them on their mission.”