Although the only printers that make headlines in the tech world these days are the kind used to fabricate 3D objects, many companies still rely heavily on paper as part of their day-to-day operations. Ripcord Inc. believes that the key to bringing them into the digital era is robotics.

The startup’s futuristic pitch is backed by $9.5 million in newly raised funding from Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak and three venture capital firms. Ripcord announced the investment on Thursday alongside the launch of its document digitization business, which is founded on an internally designed system that uses robotic scanners to process paperwork. The flow of work in turn is supervised by an artificial intelligence specifically calibrated to handle physical records.

One of the system’s main strengths is that it doesn’t require documents to be manually organized before processing. Instead, a company’s administrative staff only needs to place their records in file boxes and ship them to Ripcord. The startup’s machine can remove staples and the other fasteners normally responsible for paper jams while automatically accounting for variations in page size.

The result, according to today’s launch announcement, is that Ripcord enables organizations to digitize physical records up to ten times faster than they can with the help of a competitor. Cofounder and Chief Executive Alex Fielding told Xconomy that his firm charges four-tenths to eight-tenths of a penny per page depending on the volume of records processed for a client. Its customer base includes financial institutions, healthcare companies and law firms among others.

Ripcord will seek to bring additional organizations aboard in the wake of this week’s investment by expanding into new locations. The first step of the effort is set to see the startup move its flagship digitization center in Hayward, California, to a larger warehouse with more room for robotic document scanners. Further down the line, Fielding and his team plan to set up additional facilities around the world. 

The company has high hopes for the expansion. The startup expects that the new Hayward facility will soon digitize 2.5 million documents a day, while its worldwide processing volume is expected to reach 50 million a day by the end of 2018. 

Image: Ripcord