By Soumoshree Mukherjee
Extend officially launched its modern document processing cloud, announcing on Wednesday a combined $17 million in Series A funding. The fresh capital will accelerate the startup’s mission to reimagine how enterprises process unstructured data embedded in documents, the company noted in a statement.
The raise was led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from Y Combinator, Homebrew, Character, and high-profile angels including Scott Belsky (former CSO of Adobe) and Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel).
Founded by Kushal Byatnal and Eli Badgio, Extend delivers an end-to-end solution that blends large language models (LLMs), robust APIs, and intuitive operator tools into a unified platform. Before launching Extend, CEO Byatnal held technical roles across data infrastructure teams, while Badgio brought his operational experience from scaling early-stage startups.
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The founding team’s vision is rooted in the belief that documents, often the final systems of record for critical business data, remain one of the most underserved categories in modern enterprise software.
“Very few people appreciate the central role that documents play in every one of the world’s most critical industries… and even fewer understand the difficulty of bringing automation into production,” wrote Badgio in a LinkedIn post following the announcement. “Extend is solely focused on solving even the hardest problems in document ingestion so that your team can focus on everything else.”
Unlike traditional document APIs or OCR engines, Extend provides what it calls “a document processing cloud” — a full-stack infrastructure solution capable of parsing everything from images and tables to handwriting, signatures, and edge-case formatting. By combining advanced LLM context management techniques like semantic chunking and table header continuation with human-in-the-loop validation and automated optimization, Extend promises production-level reliability even in high-stakes industries like healthcare, finance, and logistics.
The platform is already live with customers such as Brex, Square, Checkr, Flatiron Health, and several Fortune 500 companies. “Extend outperformed every solution we tested including other vendors, open source and even foundation models,” said Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi. “It now powers key document workflows across our 30,000 customers, helping us build the most intelligent and modern financial platform out there.”
A major leap in usability comes with the release of Extend’s new sandbox mode, allowing teams to instantly trial the platform without lengthy onboarding. Users can upload sample documents and watch Extend generate a tailored schema, a move the team hopes will “reduce the manual time teams spend tuning schemas, crafting prompts, and debugging edge cases,” as described in the company’s announcement.
Further automating the pipeline, Extend is also rolling out beta support for automated config generation. By integrating with user evaluation sets, Extend will soon run background optimization loops that improve document parsing while users sleep.
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Commenting on the company’s broader vision, Byatnal shared that the team celebrated their Series A by baking and shipping thousands of cookies shaped like real PDFs their customers use daily. The tongue-in-cheek campaign captures Extend’s mission: to make working with documents less painful and much more intelligent.
As the company looks ahead, its ambition is clear: “We’ve built the first and only full-stack document processing cloud on the market today… And we’re just getting started.”