Expedock, a Philippine-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has announced that it has raised $4 million in seed funding.

Investors for the round include Ali Partovi, who led with a $2.5 million investment, as well as executives from Ebay, Salesforce, Linkedin, and Instagram.

The lead investor, Ali Partovi, was also a former investor in Airbnb, Dropbox, and Facebook.

Launched in 2019 by King Alandy Dy, Rui Aguiar, and Jeff Tan, Expedock is a startup that uses AI to understand documents as well as extract key pieces of information from them.

This is particularly useful for companies that want to digitalise their document handling and extract key pieces of information such as addresses, invoice numbers, dates, company names, and more.

The technology currently powers back-offices for many businesses, especially those in freight forwarding / supply chain.

Expedock claims the company is capable of saving up to 90% of clients' costs in "data extraction" and "data entry", as well as decreasing turnaround time by up to 10X.

Moving forward, Expedock plans to use the funds to expand the team as it continues to accommodate a growing number of international clients.

The company also adds that manual data processing remains one of the biggest operational challenges for businesses, especially those in the supply-chain industry.

The supply-chain market is projected to reach $37.41 billion by 2027.

“We’ve seen firsthand how the errors in the first mile of shipping lead to costly corrections amounting up to US$25,000. Freight forwarders have had to manually encode and process significant amounts of paperwork which with one mistake could cost a company thousands of dollars to correct,” remarked Alandy Dy.