Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#11

Post by maxmaio » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 6:58 PM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

Yes there is definitely a boom in document related startups. We see our niche as focusing on non technical users. We have focused on making it easy to build schemas, an audit and review experience, and integrating into downstream applications.

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#12

Post by maxmaio » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:01 PM UTC

hk1337 wrote: post #8

This is interesting. Can you do this with emails?

We currently support pdf, docx, most image types (jpeg/jpg, png, heic), and excel.

saving the email as a pdf would work!

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#13

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:03 PM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#14

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#15

Post by tlofreso » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

"accurate document extraction is becoming a commodity with powerful VLMs"

Agree.

The capability is fairly trivial for orgs with decent technical talent. The tech / processes all look similar:

User uploads file --> Azure prebuilt-layout returns .MD --> prompt + .MD + schema set to LLM --> JSON returned. Do whatever you want with it.

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#16

Post by zh2408 » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:13 PM UTC

Saw reducto released benchmark related to your product: https://reducto.ai/blog/rd-tablebench Curious your take on the benchmark and how well midship performs

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#17

Post by mitchpatin » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

TableFlow co-founder here - I don't want to distract from the Midship launch (congrats!) but did want to add my 2 cents.

We see a ton of industries/use-cases still bogged down by manual workflows that start with data extraction. These are often large companies throwing many people at the issue ($$). The vast majority of these companies lack technical teams required to leverage VLMs directly (or at least the desire to manage their own software). There’s a ton of room for tailored solutions here, and I don't think it's a winner-take-all space.

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#18

Post by maxmaio » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:26 PM UTC

zh2408 wrote: post #16

Saw reducto released benchmark related to your product: https://reducto.ai/blog/rd-tablebench Curious your take on the benchmark and how well midship performs

The reducto guys are great! Their benchmark is not exactly how we would index our product because we extract into a user specified template vs. extracting into markdown (wysiwyg). That being said their eval aligns with our internal findings of commercial OCR offerings.

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#19

Post by maxmaio » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

mitchpatin wrote: post #17

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

TableFlow co-founder here - I don't want to distract from the Midship launch (congrats!) but did want to add my 2 cents. We see a ton of industries/use-cases still bogged down by manual workflows that start with data extraction. These are often large companies throwing many people at the issue ($$). The vast majority of these companies lack technical teams required to leverage VLMs directly (or at least the desire to…

+1 to what mitch said. We believe there is a large market for non-technical users who can now automate extraction tasks but do not know how to interact with apis. Midship is another option for them that requires 0 programming!

Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data

#20

Post by kietay » Wed, Nov 06, 2024, 7:45 PM UTC

tlofreso wrote: post #15

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch! A quick search in the YC startup directory brought up 5-10 companies doing pretty much the same thing: - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is bec…

"accurate document extraction is becoming a commodity with powerful VLMs" Agree. The capability is fairly trivial for orgs with decent technical talent. The tech / processes all look similar: User uploads file --> Azure prebuilt-layout returns .MD --> prompt + .MD + schema set to LLM --> JSON returned. Do whatever you want with it.

Totally agree that this is becoming the standard "reference architecture" for this kind of pipeline. The only thing that complicates this a lot today is complex inputs. For simple 1-2 page PDFs what you describes works quite well out of the box but for 100+ page doc it starts to fall over in ways I described in another comment.