Heres a real world use case, our company has moved our pension provider. This provider like the old one sucks at providing me with a good way to navigate through the 120 funds I can invest in. I want to create something that can paginate through 12 pages of html, perform clicks, download pdf fund factsheet, extract data from this factsheet into excel or CSV. Can this help? What's the best way to deal with the initial…
Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
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Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#42Whats pricing look like with HIPAA compliance?
Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#43Congrats on the launch! I’m curious to hear more about your pivot from AI workflow builder to document parsing. I can see correlations there, but that original idea seems like a much larger opportunity than parsing PDFs to tables in what is an already very crowded space. What verticals did you find have this problem specifically that gave you enough conviction to pivot?
We saw initial traction with real estate firms extracting property data like rent rolls. But we've also seen traction in other verticals like accounting and intake forms. The original idea was very ambitious and when talking to potential customers they all seemed to be happy with the existing players.
Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
We saw initial traction with real estate firms extracting property data like rent rolls. But we've also seen traction in other verticals like accounting and intake forms. The original idea was very ambitious and when talking to potential customers they all seemed to be happy with the existing players.
How do you guarantee that nothing in an extracted rent roll is hallucinated?
Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#45Congrats 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…
I could definitely point to minor differences between all the platforms, but you're right that everyone is tackling the same unstructured data problem.
In general, I think it will be a couple years before anyone really butts heads in the market. The problem space is just that big. I'm constantly blown away by how big the document problem at these mid sized businesses. And most of these companies don't have any engineers on staff. So no attempt has ever been made to fix it.
Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#46Curious what are the biggest complain from your users? Are they willing to manually auditing the numbers in the table, make sure the output is 1. accurate. 2. formatted in the table they expected.
Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious - have you compared Gemini against Anthropic and OpenAI’s offerings here? Am needing to do something similar for a one-off task and simply need to choose a model to use.
Gemini is an awful developer experience but accuracy for OCR tasks is close to perfect. The pricing is also basically unbeatable - works out to 1k 10k pages per dollar depending on the model. OpenAI has subtle hallucinations and I haven’t profiled Anthropic.
Some pointers on what worked for you would be greatly appreciated.
Re: Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
#48Saw your demo video. Are you focusing on the finance sector primarily? It is a challenging industry IMO, requiring high accuracy and has strict privacy/security bar. How do you address these concerns? Curious what are the biggest complain from your users? Are they willing to manually auditing the numbers in the table, make sure the output is 1. accurate. 2. formatted in the table they expected.
I'm curious as well to see how they are handling accuracy, since I had to build an external agent to validate data.