Today, artificial intelligence and agents are being touted by every company, to put it mildly. But Tomáš Gogár, Petr Baudiš and Tomáš Tunys already bet on this technology ten years ago. At that time, the trio decided to abandon their doctoral studies in AI at the Faculty of Czech Technical University and instead started their own business. At the startup Rossum, the friends focused on teaching systems to automatically read documents or invoices - thus relieving people of routine and manual work. Now they are opening a new chapter, as Rossum is being bought by the American company Coupa.
“It is a transitional period, it is one of the milestones in the entire process, but we are happy with where we have brought Rossum,” Petr Baudiš comments on current events for CzechCrunch. According to him, Rossum continues to operate as part of a larger whole. “We have a lot of work ahead of us,” he adds. All the founders in the project will remain under the wing of Coupa. Rossum itself is currently said to employ around 150 people, most of whom are from Prague and the Czech Republic. Key employees will also earn money from the deal, thanks to the employee stock option scheme (ESOP).
Neither Rossum nor Coupa have commented on the sale price. Nor have they commented on whether – and in what proportion – the transaction was settled in cash and shares.
Among startups with Czech founders, Rossum was among the most invested. At the very beginning in 2017, the project was supported by the accelerator StartupYard and the investment group Miton, but they did not comment on the specific amount at the time. However, Miton revealed that it held a one-third stake at the time. Subsequently, in 2019, Rossum raised around 80 million crowns, when the London funds LocalGlobe and Seedcamp joined the Czech investors.
The startup continued to grow rapidly and at the end of 2021, during the “Covid fever”, when investors were pumping money into startups in large quantities and their valuations were also at high levels, Rossum announced the largest investment round of the so-called Series A in the Central and Eastern European region to that time. Led by the well-known American venture capital fund General Catalyst, it raised a hundred million dollars at the time, almost 2.2 billion crowns in the then conversion, making it one of the hot candidates for the so-called billion-dollar unicorns. However, this goal was not surpassed in the end, Rossum did not make any further investments and is now changing owners.
Miton describes the current transaction as a “very nice deal”, according to the statement, he should have held about a fifth of the stake in the startup until now. “The sale of Rossum is a great success and a necessary positive signal for the Czech startup scene in an unprecedentedly volatile time in terms of investment,” comments Tomáš Matějček, one of Miton’s founding partners, on the current transaction.
With Rossum having raised a total of more than two billion crowns from investors and investors describing the current transaction as a very successful one – and also taking into account the positive sentiment on the market around AI startups, which significantly increases investor appetite and company valuations –, CzechCrunch estimates that the sale sum could be in the order of billions of crowns.
“Tomáš Gogár, Petr Baudiš and Tomáš Tunys bet on AI long before it was cool. They built the company from Prague, first with Czech investors, who were then joined by top funds from the USA and Great Britain,” says Matějček, adding that the emotion is positive for Miton also because he has worked with the founders from the very beginning. “We could see that they deserved their success both through hard work and great humanity. If they are to be a role model for the upcoming generation of AI founders, we can be optimistic in the Czech Republic,” he adds.
The founder of the online supermarket Rohlík, Tomáš Čupr, was also a shareholder in Rossum, which he announced in 2023 when he presented the creation of his investment group TCF Capital. It is not clear when he invested in the startup.
Gogár, Baudiš and Tunys founded Rossum as a solution for intelligent document processing, the so-called IDP from the English Intelligent Document Processing. In doing so, they automated a large amount of manual work in companies and trained document reading on tens of millions of real contracts. The result was the so-called transactional language model (T-LLM), as the company calls it.
“Rossum is completely changing the rules of the game. As a strong partner since 2024, we know that the connection of the two companies brings incredible value throughout the entire process from purchase to payment,” comments Leagh Turner, CEO of Coupa. The company is behind the development of the platform for autonomous expense management and is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. Its shares were also traded on the New York Stock Exchange Nasdaq from 2016 to 2023, after which it was taken off the stock exchange by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for eight billion dollars (167 billion crowns).
Coupa currently serves ten million customers and suppliers, helping them monitor expenses and optimize their finances. In addition, it has a data set of information with a volume of ten trillion dollars. “Over the past twenty years, we have managed to save customers more than $ 300 billion. We believe that with Rossum we can help them save another $ 300 billion within five years thanks to an unrivaled decision-making system and intelligence,” Turner describes.
“Joining with Coupa is a natural evolution of a long-standing partnership built on a shared culture focused on AI. By combining our proprietary T-LLM transaction intelligence with Coupa’s vast data set, we are ideally positioned to deliver immediate value to customers and fundamentally change the way the world buys and sells,” adds Tomáš Gogár.