In the early days of Rossum, Tomas Gogar walked around Prague asking companies if they would give him their invoices. He needed real examples of the paperwork businesses use to request payment so he could train software to extract data from them automatically. Invoices, purchase orders, and packing lists arrive in many layouts, languages, and file types. Inside many finance and operations teams, people still handled them by hand.
Gogar, Rossum’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, came to the problem through academic research. He began studying physics before shifting toward programming and artificial intelligence, eventually pursuing a PhD. In the lab, he met his co-founders, Petr Baudis and Tomas Tunys, while working on systems designed to extract data from structured documents. The work showed promise, but only when documents followed predictable patterns.
The team spent time speaking with consultants and accountants, where conversations with colleagues from Ernst & Young pointed them toward traditional data capture systems and their limits. Invoices were everywhere, and yet automation remained brittle.
The first documents Rossum collected were written in Czech. That was enough to train early systems, but it narrowed the audience quickly. Companies outside the region expected software that could handle documents across countries, languages, and formats.
Gogar focused Rossum on transactional documents because mistakes carried consequences. A single incorrect value or missing field could cause payment issues or expose companies to risk. Rather than filling gaps with guesses, the software was built to surface uncertainty and keep edge cases visible.
The company grew steadily. Rossum now employs more than 200 people across five offices and serves over 450 customers worldwide. Its software is used by enterprises including Siemens, Bosch, Flexport, AB InBev, and Panasonic, and connects with large procurement and finance systems.
Nearly a decade ago, Rossum needed invoices badly enough that its founder went looking for them door to door. The documents are easier to find now. The work of understanding them remains.