As a Ph.D student, Kuang Chen spent time in Tanzania counting the number of people who started HIV antiretroviral medication but didn’t complete treatment.

During his research, Chen came up with the idea to solve what he called “the paper problem.” It would eventually lead him to launch Captricity, a startup that promises an easy, fast and cost-effective way to capture data trapped on paper and convert it into digital data. With Captricity, users can either scan or take photos of forms and upload them so that the data in them can be searched, shored and shared. It can process forms for just a few cents per page and can handle large amounts of data in about a day. Knight, which invested in Captricity through its Enterprise Fund, talked with Chen about what helped him launch the cloud-based service and why the march to a digital-only future may not happen as fast as we think. What elements besides your Ph.D research helped you launch Captricity? K.C.: When I had finished my undergraduate degree, I joined a startup. It didn’t succeed, but it gave me an appreciation for building a company and seeing how far you can get with just a few people. Like many others, I was also inspired by Paul Farmer and his work building Partners in Health. But the truth is I’ve always had a love for data and its potential to help people and communities. Who are some of Captricity’s early users? How are you seeing people adopt its services? K.C.: They fall into a couple of categories: occasional users doing data-driven projects, researchers or marketers doing surveys and governments. For example, California’s Fair Political Practice Commission is working to make information related to the source of an elected official’s income, investments and business positions more easily accessible. You can see its data gallery online. The other category is paperwork that’s part of operational workflows, like applications, invoices, inventories, and feedback cards. These customers need their data in downstream systems, so recently we added the ability to push data directly into Salesforce. One of our strengths is our versatility. Captricity can help solve problems for many different sectors from government to healthcare and more. What do you say to people who say that eventually paper will just go away? K.C.: Paper isn’t the problem, it’s getting to the data that is trapped in the paper that’s the problem. Yes, the amount of paper in the world may start to decline once we all move to iPads, tablets, etc. But for a lot of organizations, it will be a long time before they’re able to be totally digital, especially for low resourced ones. We need to meet them where they are. Captricity is making a value proposition that you can keep paper workflow, but still adopt a useful and helpful digital system. What else is important to know about Captricity? K.C: Our data accuracy. Most of the existing automated solutions out there that are optical character recognition based only get to 80% accuracy, but you really need to be at 99% in order to trust a system’s output. With Captricity, our algorithms use a mixture of human and machine intelligence to gets you there without having to manually recheck everything. Before, you couldn’t trust the results, and now you can – that’s our most compelling value. You can learn more about how to get started using Captricity in this video, by visiting its website or e-mailing them at [email protected] By Elizabeth R. Miller, communications associate at Knight Foundation