Skilja Blog

Happy 12th birthday Skilja

by | Jan 25, 2024 | Company

Unbelievable – but 24.01.2024 was the twelfth birthday of Skilja. Meaning that next year Skilja will become a teenager.

12 years ago we founded Skilja in the middle of the German winter with the goal to create the best possible Document Understanding or IDP (as others call it) solution. And now we look back and we are proud that we have achieved the goal – at least in our view. A lot has happened on the way. We have created:

  • A leading classification technology with statistical, semantic and LLM classifiers with more than 1.000 customers world wide
  • An extraction framework that allows a customer to do anything from forms, invoices to totally freeform contracts in the same environment with no technology disruption from one designer
  • Our own recognition engine – AI based – as we were not happy with existing engines
  • A powerful process platform – used by > 250 enterprises world wide on premise and in the cloud with some of them processing 500.000 documents per day.

And of course we look back to a big number of great projects and successes in the market and a lot of happy customers. This we achieved not alone but only with the help of our partners that one by one joined our partner network in the last 12 years. Thanks a lot to them for their commitment, their dedication, their encouragement.

Sometimes we also ask ourselves – how did we do that? In the end we are just a medium sized company with (now) 24 developers and engineers. The answer – I believe – is FOCUS. We were always very clear what we wanted to achieve and focused our energy on these ideas and did not allow ourselves to be distracted. This is the key of our success together with our absolut customer centric approach (which might seem in conflict with focus, but in reality is not if it is handled and communicated correctly). And of course we have a tremendous team and pool of talent which I am very grateful for. It also seems that we made some correct technological decisions on our way which pay of now – focus on services, web interfaces, machine learning approaches, ease of use, high quality of software development with most advanced tools…

Skilja was created as an independent technology provider with a strong partner network and our plan is to stay such in the years to come. Independence is no value in itself but is the core of our ability to innovate. We do not need to look at quarterly results but can define long term development goals, decide on them and follow them to the end. This makes us strong and successful and will continue to do so.

Thank all of you to make that possible.

Alexander Goerke, CEO