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Mindee

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PPP
Updated
  • Type: Document-processing and OCR software sold as an API to developers.
  • Founded: 2018 in Paris; legal entity Mindee SAS; offices in Paris and San Francisco.
  • Pandemic role: Document-classification tool inside Womply's PPP application platform, named in Womply's lender contracts and court filings; not a lender and not an eligibility decision-maker.
  • Current status: Venture-backed company; its chief executive in its 2024 release was Jonathan Grandperrin. It raised a $14 million Series A in October 2021.
  • Related article: Mindee and the OCR Assembly Line

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: the tool that sorted uploaded tax documents in Womply's PPP flow.
  • What Mindee did for applicants: nothing directly; applicants uploaded tax forms to Womply's site, and Womply ran them through third-party document tools.
  • What Mindee sold to other companies: an API that reads photos and PDFs of documents and returns their fields as structured data, plus classification of document types.
  • Where responsibility sat: partner lenders made the credit and eligibility decisions; Womply ran the application platform and paid the tool vendors.

Before the pandemic

Mindee was founded in Paris in 2018, according to its own 2024 press release, and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch. When it announced its first large round in October 2021, it described itself as an "API-first platform designed for developers to eliminate manual data entry." It listed uses including expense management, accounts payable, accounting, insurance, employee onboarding, "loan applications" and "underwriting."

During the pandemic

Mindee's documented PPP role runs through Womply's "Fast Lane" platform. Womply's developer order form with the lender Benworth Capital, effective April 14, 2021, names Mindee among the "Third-Party Providers" integrated into the platform, alongside Plaid, Docusign, LexisNexis, Teslar, Inscribe, Ocrolus, Persona and others. The form adds that Womply "has no control over and assumes no responsibility for" those providers' actions, errors or omissions. The same list appears in the draft Womply sent the loan agent Blueacorn in May 2021.

The arbitrator in Womply's dispute with Benworth found that Womply's technology "analyzed and extracted data from documents using Inscribe, Mindee, and Ocrolus," and that Womply paid those providers for their technology. Womply's July 2024 amended complaint in federal court in Puerto Rico is more specific. It says the platform "classified tax documents provided by applicants using third-party application Mindee," while Ocrolus extracted information from the tax documents and Ocrolus and Inscribe scanned bank and tax documents for potential fraud. The complaint adds that Womply added these services at different times and that not every service applied to every application. That is Womply's pleading, not a court finding.

Womply's May 2021 overview of its checks for Blueacorn describes the step without naming a vendor. It says that "since March 14" Womply had been running "real-time evaluations of 100% of the tax documents uploaded." A "machine-learning platform" detected the document type, such as the schedule and year, and told the borrower whether the right forms had been provided.

Neither Mindee's 2021 nor its 2024 press release mentions the PPP or Womply. The SBA's public PPP data list no loan to a company named Mindee; the only borrowers with that word in their names are individuals.

After the pandemic

On October 6, 2021 Mindee announced a $14 million Series A led by GGV Capital, with Alven, Serena Capital and Bpifrance's Digital Venture fund. At the time it said it was headquartered in San Francisco and Paris. In March 2024 it released docTI, a tool it said could process any document type without training a custom model. Its Y Combinator page, as of June 2026, lists Paris as its location and 60 employees. Mindee's own customer-stories page features European software companies such as PayFit and Spendesk.

Source notes

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