Alberto Gimeno is in a unique position today, as he stands in the middle of a technological change that promises to redefine how businesses handle their most tedious yet most critical operations. The Spanish mathematician-turned-entrepreneur has built his company, Invofox, into a powerhouse that processes millions of documents annually, transforming chaotic paperwork into organized digital information for over 100 companies worldwide.
When Alberto Gimeno Sánchez relocated to San Francisco in June 2024, he carried with him more than just entrepreneurial ambitions. With him was the culmination of nearly a decade of technical experimentation, business failures, and hard-won insights about the persistent problem that plagues every modern office: the mountain of disorganized documents that required humans to decode. His company, Invofox, processes over 17 million invoices and documents annually across Europe and is rapidly expanding into North America, but the journey to this scale began with a simple observation about the inefficiency of manual data entry.
"Just as Stripe transformed online payments and Twilio redefined communications by offering powerful APIs, Invofox is revolutionizing how businesses exchange document-based information online," Gimeno explains. The comparison is deliberate, as Stripe processes $1.4 trillion annually with a valuation exceeding $90 billion, while Twilio generates $4 billion in revenue with an $18 billion market cap. Gimeno sees document processing as the next infrastructure layer ripe for automation, and his company's trajectory suggests he might be right.
The Mathematics of True Automation
Alberto Gimeno's path to document processing began with dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. This academic foundation proved to be crucial when he co-founded his first startup in 2015, although it was the failures that he encountered that truly educated him about market realities. Before Invofox, he launched AlquilaLibros, a book rental service, and Whisper, a hardware security company focused on panic buttons. Each venture taught him something different about customer needs and market timing.
The breakthrough came when Gimeno and his co-founder, Carmelo Juanes, recognized that artificial intelligence could finally solve what traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) had intended to but never fully delivered: truly intelligent document processing. While OCR systems read everything on a page, humans instinctively focus on what matters. Training AI to mimic this selective attention became Invofox's core innovation. The company's technology goes beyond simple text extraction, validating fields, autocompleting missing data, and catching errors that could cost businesses thousands of dollars per mistake.
The technical architecture that Gimeno's team built handles the reception of millions of documents simultaneously, automatically splitting files, classifying document types, and scoring image quality. When a vendor fails to include their address on an invoice, Invofox automatically fills in the missing information. When tax calculations appear incorrect, the system flags potential errors before they propagate through accounting systems. This level of intelligence requires multiple AI models working in parallel, with the system determining which combination of technologies best serves each specific use case.
Building the Appropriate Infrastructure for the Software Economy
The business model Alberto Gimeno developed reflects his understanding that successful technology companies become an infrastructure rather than just an application. Invofox operates as an API-first platform, allowing software companies to integrate document processing capabilities directly into their existing workflows. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions use Invofox to automate accounts payable processes, while payroll companies leverage the technology to migrate customers from competing platforms by automatically parsing historical employee data from payslips.
This infrastructure approach has attracted over 100 clients globally, including notable names like Aon, Cegid, and Holded. The company has raised $11.2 million from European and American investors, with annual recurring revenue exceeding $3 million and growing at more than 10 percent month-over-month. The financial metrics reflect a business that has found product-market fit in a substantial market, but Gimeno's ambitions extend far beyond current performance.
The expansion into the United States represents more than geographic growth. American software companies operate at different scales and have different compliance requirements from their European counterparts. Adapting Invofox's technology and sales processes for the US market required a full year of preparation, but early customers like Scripta Insights, aACE, and Repositrak demonstrate that the localization efforts have succeeded. The American market offers the potential for exponential growth, given the larger scale of enterprise software adoption and the higher tolerance for automation investments.
Where Humans Belong in Automation
Despite building technology that automates human tasks, Alberto Gimeno maintains that Invofox creates rather than destroys employment opportunities. His observations from client implementations suggest that automation actually changes how people work rather than eliminating their roles entirely. With the help of correct automation, accounting professionals who had previously spent hours on repetitive data entry can now focus on advisory services and strategic analysis. The technology enables them to offer more sophisticated and focused services to their clients, creating a competitive advantage.
"We've implemented our technology with success across many clients, and as far as we know, no jobs have been destroyed by implementing Invofox. Instead, people change how they work," Infovox cofounder Carmelo Juanes notes. This perspective reflects his broader philosophy about artificial intelligence as an augmentation tool rather than a fearful replacement. The most successful implementations occur when companies view AI as enabling human expertise rather than substituting for it.
The global compliance requirements that Invofox meets across the European Union and the US are evidence of the complexity of building a truly international infrastructure. Different countries have varying regulations about data processing, document retention, and financial reporting. Gimeno's team has obtained certifications that allow multinational corporations to use Invofox across their global operations without worrying about regulatory compliance in individual jurisdictions.
Major Strides That Only Signal the Beginning
As artificial intelligence continues to develop, Alberto Gimeno sees document processing as just the beginning of a broader change in how businesses handle information. The same principles that make Invofox successful, such as selective attention, error detection, and automated completion, apply to many other forms of unstructured data. The company's success in processing tens of millions of documents annually provides a foundation for expanding into adjacent markets where similar problems exist.
For Alberto Gimeno and his partners, the goal remains constant: building the infrastructure that allows software companies to focus on their core business rather than the tedious work of extracting meaning from documents.
