Ripcord Lays Channel Groundwork, Hires Channel Exec

Ripcord, a robotic digitization company, is out to disrupt the records-management industry with channel partners.

Ripcord’s Alan Brotman

The four-year-old company just hired Alan Brotman, its new vice president of channels and alliances, to formalize its channel program.

Ripcord spent its first two years in technology development and since taking its product to market, 60 percent of sales in 2018 went through partners.

“This is our big go-to-market year,” Brotman told Channel Futures. “Our partner road map is just getting off the ground, and [as] part of our formalization process we’re going to be working to formalize some of the relationships that we already have with partners, as well as expand our team.”

Brotman will help Ripcord identify new partners in targeted vertical markets, bring them on board, enable them and build the company’s partner program. He joined Ripcord from PRM Advisory Group, a partner program development company he founded. Prior to that he spent more than a decade at competitor Iron Mountain, holding various vice president-level positions.

Up to now, Ripcord has worked informally with several channel and alliance partners. The company has raised $65 million in funding from leading investors including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Baidu, Lux Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Steve Wozniak, Legend Star and Icon Ventures.

The company uses state-of-the-art robotics digitization to convert paper to digital records. It also offers a content enrichment and repository service.

“Think of us as an end-to-end, cloud series of services, all of which are critical in a company’s digital transformation initiative,” said Brotman.

Ripcord takes records, whether they start out in paper or digital format, adds enrichment and analytic services on the converted documents, and delivers them back on their own cloud repository for search and retrieval. The vendor also can integrate the delivery of its content enrichment to a customer’s enterprise content management (ECM) system or other enterprise application.

Not only does Ripcord want to help businesses go paperless, but help them extract huge amounts of valuable data hidden in paper records. Ripcord organizes and prepares a customer’s records for digitization via its robots, or Workcells. The Workcells digitize each image in full color at high resolution and produce a fully searchable PDF of each record. The records are securely stored and managed via Ripcord Canopy, a records management platform.

Partners can offer a number of services – such as conversion – for all of the imaging, data analytics and repository services that are subscription-based.

“All of the three different elements of our services — conversion either from digital or paper, all of the content enrichment piece, as well as the ongoing subscription revenue for people that use our Canopy platform,” said Brotman.