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Sam Bobley

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Co-founder and CEO of Ocrolus, a document-automation and fraud-detection vendor used by Cross River, Square, BlueVine and Womply in PPP processing; Ocrolus took a $1,344,455 PPP loan that was forgiven.

Identity and role

Sam Bobley is the co-founder and chief executive of Ocrolus, Inc., a New York document-automation company that turns uploaded financial paperwork into structured, fraud-scored data for lenders and banks. He has held the CEO title since he started the company in 2014 (TechCrunch); in 2025 he was named to a Top 25 fintech AI executives list (Differential summary) and spoke at Money20/20 in Las Vegas (Ocrolus video page). The company's PPP loan record lists it at 101 Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan (PPPReport; we have a copy).

Biography

He started Ocrolus at 22 (Business of Business); the University of South Carolina degree is self-reported on LinkedIn. There is no substantial prior employer in the record.

By his own account (Business of Business), the idea came from an elder-law attorney's Medicaid long-term-care applications, which require years of bank statements read by hand; he researched the problem at his parents' kitchen table and settled on machine reading checked by humans. The early product served lawyers and accountants before the company pivoted to fintech and online lending. His father's PhoneCharge sale and the co-founder names are cited to a Wharton FinTech interview and vary by source.

The first office was in Glen Cove on Long Island, with early engineers hired out of Hofstra; the team later moved to a Wall Street address (Business of Business). Ocrolus grew its annual recurring revenue from about $1 million in early 2018 to roughly $20 million by mid-2021 (TechCrunch).

The company and its PPP role

Ocrolus sells what it calls document automation: it classifies an uploaded document, extracts the fields that matter, checks for tampering, and analyzes cash flow and income. It combines optical character recognition and machine learning with a human-verification layer it markets as reaching better than 99% accuracy. The customers are lenders (Brex, Enova, LendingClub, PayPal, SoFi) and Cross River Bank, which is both a partner and an investor through its venture arm.

Ocrolus says its software helped process more than 2.5 million PPP loans, working with partners that included Cross River Bank, Square, BlueVine, and Womply (Series C release). By Cross River's account, Ocrolus's technology let the bank process applications in as little as eight minutes (Cross River post). Ocrolus also marketed PPP-specific products: a loan-forgiveness automation tool with a built-in audit trail, and document-tampering detection that the company said caught a rise in file tampering tied to PPP over the summer of 2020.

In Womply's arbitration against Benworth Capital Partners the corrected final award records Womply's testimony that Fast Lane "analyzed and extracted data from documents using Inscribe, Mindee, and Ocrolus." Ocrolus read documents; it made no credit decisions and collected no agent fees. The December 2022 House Select Subcommittee staff report named lenders and facilitators (Kabbage, BlueVine, Cross River, Celtic Bank, Blueacorn, Womply) and does not mention Ocrolus.

Their own relief

Ocrolus took a PPP loan of its own. Our copy of the PPPReport page lists Ocrolus, Inc. with a loan in the $1–2 million range, 20 jobs retained, approved May 1, 2020, through JPMorgan Chase; the exact amount of $1,344,455 and the April 8, 2021 forgiveness date are cited to ProPublica's SBA loan-level data.

No regulatory enforcement action by the SEC, CFPB, FTC, or SBA inspector general against Ocrolus or Bobley appears in the public record, and neither is named in the House PPP-fraud report. A docket search surfaces two matters styled against Ocrolus, neither alleging wrongdoing by the company. One, Davidson v. Ocrolus in the Southern District of New York, was a miscellaneous proceeding opened and closed in November 2024 (CourtListener docket). The other, Cashel v. Ocrolus (Del. Bankr. adversary 25-52101-TMH), is a 2025 clawback suit. The complaint, filed August 22, 2025, is brought by the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors of AmeriFirst Financial, Inc. (and Phoenix 1040 LLC). AmeriFirst is an Arizona mortgage lender at 575 W. Chandler Blvd. in Chandler that filed Chapter 11 on August 24, 2023 (No. 23-11240). It is a routine preference action under 11 U.S.C. §§ 547 and 550: the committee asks Ocrolus to return at least $10,000 in payments AmeriFirst made it during the 90-day window before the bankruptcy (May 26 to August 24, 2023) and to disallow Ocrolus's claims against the estate. The complaint alleges no wrongdoing by Ocrolus, only that it was "a vendor or creditor to the Debtors" paid in the preference period. Ocrolus also appears as a creditor in several of its lender-clients' bankruptcies.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Bobley still runs Ocrolus and has steered it into "vertical AI" document analysis for credit decisioning, with mortgage products such as the expanded quality-control tool Inspect (Ocrolus release and 2024 review). No new large funding round has been disclosed since the 2021 Series C (TechCrunch). Customer counts, application volumes, headcount and valuation figures past 2021 are not carried in the sources we have.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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