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Accelerators

Pythonic Corporation: Artificial intelligence that works

Serial entrepreneur Matt Younkle is driven by an intense curiosity and a passion for learning. Describing himself as an “engineer at heart,” he spent his childhood poring over volumes of How Stuff Works. With a goal to learn something new every day, the product-centric CEO has sharpened his focus on automating the tedious aspects of document processing.

The breadth of experience Younkle brings to his latest endeavor is impressive. Both a computer and electrical engineer, Younkle patented Turbo Tap, a beer dispensing technology now used in stadiums across the country, before he graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison. After that, he developed the digital music platform Murfie. In between, he had a hand in a streaming media startup, as well as an early intelligent document processing startup.

It was there he became interested in optical character recognition. Younkle could see how automation could impact document handling, despite the limitations of technology of the time. He continued to explore artificial intelligence and how it could transform document handling after moving on from the company. Years later, an opportunity presented itself to revisit automated document processing with new technologies.

Founded in 2019, Pythonic Corporation provides intelligent document processing of both scanned paper and digital documents. Using automation and machine intelligence, the software offers solutions for the classification, routing, extraction, deduplication and summarization of documents. The company focuses on a vertical silo of clients to ensure a high level of accuracy when handling documents.

“We tune our applications for very specific industries and very specific document types, and the reason we do that is because that way we can do things at very high precision,” he said. “There are more broad-based document processing platforms that are out there and they work generally well with a lot of different documents. But we feel when you’re automating things, the final 5% is really important. There’s a lot of solutions that kind of get you 95% of the way, or 90% of the way, but if you really want to see some big gains from automation, from artificial intelligence, you really do have to care about that final 5%.”

Younkle, along with co-founder Pythonic Corporation and machine learning expert Dr. Baoqiang Cao, won Northwestern Mutual’s second Reverse Pitch MKE event in 2019. The company bested 15 other entrepreneurial teams with their proposed solution to a streamlining medical record review business challenge that showcased using machine learning and natural language processing. The win netted them $75,000 in seed money, workspace in Cream City Labs, and most importantly, access to the data and users the product was being designed to serve.

To encourage startups in the Milwaukee area, Younkle suggests, “folks in a community can help entrepreneurs (by trying) the products. If it’s a product in their industry, or if it’s a consumer product, if it’s something that they might want to use, just give it a try and provide the feedback. Just getting those initial users and that feedback, the faster that (development cycle) can happen. The faster that cycle can happen, the better we can be.”

The company has no plans to begin Series A fundraising at this time. The company’s focus going forward is twofold: to build out the suite of services to serve their vertical market in the life and title insurance industries and to make strides in the development of their core natural language processing technologies.

To follow the growth of Pythonic Corporation, connect with them here.