Anyline Raises €1.5M To Let You Add Optical Character Recognition To Your App

Anyline, the Austrian startup that provides mobile OCR tech to enable developers to add text recognition to their own apps, has raised €1.5 million in funding. The list of investors is interesting, too.

It includes angel investor Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, busuu co-founder Bernhard Niesner, Lukas Püspök, and the U.S.-based VC-fund iSeed Ventures. However, most notable is that the round was led by Gernot Langes-Swarovski Group .

As one investor put it to me, “the fact that the Swarovski family led the round shows that finally ‘old’ money is moving into Austrian startups”.

Offering its own mobile Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology — which uses a smartphone’s camera to accurately scan and recognise any kind of text, code or number — Anyline co-founder and CEO Lukas Kinigadner tells me the startup is built on the premise that “people screw up a lot”.

“Mistakes happen easily when you’re writing down a 10-digit-number and then have to type it in again a few moments later. Anyline can be the big helper on the side of a human, making data import faster, more accurate and safer,” he says.

Applications for Anyline’s SDK including adding barcode or passport scanning to an app. Or things like scanning electricity meter values, serial numbers and “other process enhancing information”.

“So far, we’ve seen lots of traction from enterprises which have digitalization projects running and need a reliable third party software provider,” adds Kinigadner.

“Marketing and vision-wise we are targeting software developers, who are having fun in realising awesome use cases like a ‘Scrabble letter anagram builder’ in order to educate the market about all the possibilities Anyline can bring.”

To that end, the startup says it plans to bring its OCR tech to smart glasses and will launch an Augmented Reality (AR) solution later this year. Current partnerships include a plugin for the AR technology of wikitude, a ready-to-download SDK for Epson Moverio Pro smart glasses and a distribution partnership with Konica Minolta.