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Launch HN: Midship (YC S24) – Turn PDFs, docs, and images into usable data
Hey HN, we are Max, Kieran, and Aahel from Midship (https://midship.ai https://midship.ai). Midship makes it easy to extract data from unstructured documents like pdfs and images.
Here’s a video showing it in action: https://www.loom.com/share/ae43b6abfcc24e5b82c87104339f2625?sid=2f2cf0fa-d671-4590-992a-da51712c69e1 https://www.loom.com/share/ae43b6abfcc24e5b82c87104339f2625?..., and a demo playground (no signup required!) to test it out: https://app.midship.ai/demo https://app.midship.ai/demo
We started 5 months ago initially trying to make an AI natural language workflow builder that would be a simpler alternative to Zapier or Make.com. However, most of our users seemed to be much more interested in the basic (and not very good) document extraction feature we had. Seeing how people were spending hours a day manually extracting data from pdfs inspired us to build what has become Midship!
The problem is that despite all our progress in software, huge amounts of business data still lives in PDFs and images. Sure, you can OCR them, but getting clean, structured data out is still painful. Most existing tools just give you a blob of markdown - leaving you to figure out which parts matter and how they relate.
We've found that combining OCR with language models lets us do something more useful: extract specific fields and tables that users actually care about. The LLMs help correct OCR mistakes and understand context (like knowing that "Inv#" and "Invoice Number" mean the same thing).
We have two main kinds of users today, non-technical users that extract data via our web app and developers who use our extraction api. We were initially focused on the first one as they seemed like an underserved part of the market, but we’ve received a lot of interest from developers who face the same issues.
For pricing, we currently charge a monthly Saas fee per seat for the web app and a volume based pricing for the API.
We’re really excited to share what we’ve built so far and look forward to any feedback from the community!
- tlofreso 2y agoCongrats on the launch... You're in a crowded space. What differentiates Midship? What are you doing that's novel?
- kietay 2y agoCofounder here. Great Q - there is definitely a lot of competition in dev tool offerings but less so in end to end experiences for non technical users. Some of the things we offer above and beyond dev tools: 1. Schema building to define “what data to extract” 2. A hosted web app to review, audit and export extracted data 3. Integrations into downstream applications like spreadsheets Outside of those user facing pieces, the biggest engineering effort for us has been in dealing with very complex inputs, like 100+ page PDFs. Just dumping into ChatGPT and asking nicely for the structured data falls over in both obvious (# input/output tokens exceeded) and subtle ways (e.g. missing a row in the middle of the extraction).
- seany62 2y agoAre users able to export their organized data?
- maxmaio 2y agoYes today we support exports to csv or excel from our web app!
- nostrebored 2y agoHow does your accuracy compare with VLMs like ColFlor and ColPali?
- kietay 2y agoWe think about accuracy in 2 ways Firstly as a function of the independent components in our pipeline. For example, we rely on commercial models for document layout and character recognition. We evaluate each of these and select the highest accuracy, then fine-tune where required. Secondly we evaluate accuracy per customer. This is because however good the individual compenents are, if the model "misinterprets" a single column, every row of data will be wrong in some way. This is more difficult to put a top level number on and something we're still working on scaling on a per-customer basis, but much easier to do when the customer has historic extractions they have done by hand.
- hk1337 2y agoThis is interesting. Can you do this with emails?
- tlofreso 2y agoAnd if yes, be specific in answering. Emails are a bear! Emails can have several file types as attachemtns. Including: Other emails, Zip files, in-line images where position matters for context.
- maxmaio 2y agoWe currently support pdf, docx, most image types (jpeg/jpg, png, heic), and excel. saving the email as a pdf would work!
- Brajeshwar 2y agoA friend seems to be doing it for email - https://dwata.com https://dwata.com They are early but is promising
- hubraumhugo 2y agoCongrats 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/tableflow - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reducto - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindee - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis At the same time, accurate document extraction is becoming a commodity with powerful VLMs. Are you planning to focus on a specific industry, or how do you plan to differentiate?
- hermitcrab 2y agoDo you know if there any good (pref C++) libraries for extracting data tables from PDFs?
- maxmaio 2y agoYes 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.
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- tlofreso 2y ago"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.
- kietay 2y ago
- zh2408 2y agoSaw reducto released benchmark related to your product: https://reducto.ai/blog/rd-tablebench https://reducto.ai/blog/rd-tablebench Curious your take on the benchmark and how well midship performs
- maxmaio 2y agoThe 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.
- ivanvanderbyl 2y agoCongrats 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?
- maxmaio 2y agoWe 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.
- smt88 2y agoHow do you guarantee that nothing in an extracted rent roll is hallucinated?
- themanmaran 2y agoThe same way you guarantee that a person manually typing the data never makes a mistake.
- smt88 2y agoHumans in this space tend to make mistakes like, "Added rent as per-square-foot instead of absolute value," or, "Missed a rent escalation for year 3." These tend to be easy to catch, even for the same person who's reviewing the data. They would see that rent steps looked strange (Y2 and Y4, but not Y3) or there was an order-of-magnitude difference in rent from one month to another. AI can do something like invent reasonable-looking rent steps. They're designed to create output that seems reasonable, even if it's completely made up. When humans are wrong, they tend to misread what's there, which is much less insidious than inventing something. And if you have a human reviewer for all the work this AI does, what's the point of the AI in the first place? The human has become the source of truth either way.
- serjester 2y agoHonest question but how do you see your business being affected as foundational models improve? While I have massive complaints about them, Gemini + structured outputs is working remarkably well for this internally and it's only getting better. It's also an order of magnitude cheaper than anything I've seen commercially.
- maxmaio 2y agoWe're excited for foundational models to improve because we hope it will unlock a lot more use cases. Things like analysis after extraction, able to accurately extract extremely complex documents, etc!
- arjvik 2y agoCurious - 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.
- serjester 2y agoGemini 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.
- arjvik 2y agoThanks!
- inapis 2y agoIf I may ask which model are you using? I have tried OCR'ing my bank statements in AI studio and the results have been less than optimal. Specifically it has a tendency to ignore certain instructions combined with screwing up the order. Some pointers on what worked for you would be greatly appreciated.
- monkeydust 2y agoHeres 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 task of automating webpage interactions systematically?
- maxmaio 2y agoThis is an interesting use case! We've heard similar stories from people dealing with pensions. Today we are ready to solve out of the box the extract data from a factsheet into excel or CSV step. Shoot me an email at max@midship.dev!
- calufa 2y agoHave you looked into tools https://www.multion.ai https://www.multion.ai or https://www.browserbase.com https://www.browserbase.com.
- navaed01 2y agoYou should check out Twin
- magamanlegends 2y ago[dead]
- ctippett 2y agoCongrats on the launch. I just sent y'all an email – I'm curious with what you can do with airline crew rosters.
- prithvi24 2y agoWhats pricing look like with HIPAA compliance?
- maxmaio 2y agoSend me an email here: max@midship.dev so we can learn more. We're in the process of a SOC 2 audit and should be HIPAA by end of the month!
- misstercool 2y agoSaw 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.
- XzAeRosho 2y agoI've been working on some ML solutions similar to this with, and the high accuracy is the challenging part. Specially with "creative" layout documents. I'm curious as well to see how they are handling accuracy, since I had to build an external agent to validate data.
- maxmaio 2y agoWe have seen a lot of use cases in finance and are currently working with a few firms. Accuracy is generally their primary requirement. We've been focusing on not just accuracy but also the audit experience which includes confidence scoring. Your right about security and we are currently undergoing a soc 2 audit. Generally firms are outsourcing the data entry and are already manually auditing with shortcuts like summing values. Relating to formatted in the table they expected. We extract the data directly into their template format so it is always in the table they expect.
- rco8786 2y agoCan you speak to the accuracy, particularly of numerical value extraction, that you’re achieving? I have a use case for pulling tabular financial data out of PDFs and accuracy is our main concern with using AI for that type of task.
- maxmaio 2y agoThis is something we are hyper focused on. shoot me an email at max@midhsip.dev - you can also try our financial analysis template in our playground for free: https://app.midship.ai/demo https://app.midship.ai/demo.
- drcongo 2y agoI may or may not be the target audience, but it may help you to know a "book demo" link instead of a pricing page in the primary nav is a good heuristic shortcut for me to decide I'm not the target audience.
- crossroadsguy 2y agoI would like a tool that converts x months of credit card bills into a csv (the txn table from across PDFs and pages in each PDF) or something very easily.
- kitcar 2y agoTabula can do that (open source) https://tabula.technology/ https://tabula.technology/
- robertlagrant 2y agoWow, great tip.
- anon99879 2y agoworth a shot - has a free tier: https://www.oscar-idp.com/ https://www.oscar-idp.com/
- maxmaio 2y agoyes we can! shoot me an email max@midship.dev
- abhgh 2y agoCongratulations on the launch! Its a crowded space but I think there is place for a good and accurate tool! Tried the examples - they seem tailored for specific document types. I have two questions around that: (a) is their a "best-effort" extraction you can perform or plan to support if you don't know the document type? (b) do you plan to support extraction from academic papers, i.e., potentially multi-column, with images, tables that are either single column or span two columns, equations, etc.?
- maxmaio 2y agoHi! In our playground we only included a few templates, but in our app you can create any template you'd like! So yes we can extract from academic papers! shoot me an email: max@midship.dev
- foogoo4 2y ago[dead]
- fluxode 2y agoCongrats on the launch! Just some friendly advice: financial documents such as quarterly earnings are actually highly structured via xrbl. If you are positioning the company as an unstructured -> structured process, then using these types of financial documents is probably not a great example even though everybody seems to do it.
- 747-8F 2y ago.