Document capture and data analytics company Ephesoft landed $15 million in Series A funding from Mercato Partners. This marks the company’s first round of funding since it was founded in 2010.

“Mercato’s investment will help Ephesoft realize its vision of liberating meaning through machine learning technology,” said Ike Kavas, Ephesoft’s founder. “We view Mercato as a long-term strategic partner, and we appreciate their experience in helping visionary technology companies accelerate and manage growth. This funding will enable Ephesoft to help organizations improve business outcomes by identifying and rationalizing dark data, then understanding how it impacts their business.”

Ephesoft’s cloud-based, machine learning technology generates insights from unstructured content by capturing, extracting, and analyzing raw data for its 500 customers that operate in a variety of sectors ranging from financial services, Federal government, insurance, mortgage and healthcare. At FinovateSpring 2017, the company demoed how its platform can be used to comb through international transaction data to identify and catch money launderers.

(pictured left to right): Ike Kavas (CTO)and Alex Welsh (Vice President, Analytics Practice) at FinovateSpring 2017

The California-based company will use the investment to accelerate product development and expand operations, market presence, and sales. As a part of the investment, Joe Kaiser Principal at Mercato Partners, will join Ephesoft’s Board of Directors.

In a press release, Kaiser said:

“Organizations are struggling with the enormous volume of unstructured content, which represents upwards of 80% of all available content, and is growing at a rate of 43% per year. To provide tangible value, that information needs to be processed and analyzed. Ephesoft’s solutions are disrupting the advanced capture market with a definitive value proposition: apply machine learning to convert these unstructured information streams and repositories into actionable data.”

Earlier this month, the company announced the availability of its cloud services on Microsoft Azure. In June, Ephesoft established its Asia Pacific offices in Sydney, Australia. The company was named to the 2015 Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies in America and has recently received a patent for its machine learning technology.