Some folks spend years raising capital just to play dress-up with their pitch decks. Then there’s Extend, legal name CrowdView, Inc., who walked in, parsed the noise, and exited with $17 million across seed and Series A, led by Innovation Endeavors. And they did it without a single hype buffet.
This isn’t just another artificial intelligence story dressed in SaaS clothing. Extend is building the infrastructure layer for turning ugly, real-world documents into clean, production-grade data, fast, accurate, and ready to move. It’s like handing your finance, healthcare, or supply chain stack a pair of glasses, then swapping those glasses for a private LLM that actually gets nuance. That “handwriting in the corner of a three-year-old scanned invoice” kind of nuance.
Kushal Byatnal, who once watched legacy OCR tech fumble during his Brex days, took that pain personally. The same way early musicians remembered cracked vinyl or DJs knew when the mix was off. He didn’t just set out to fix it, he found Hari Anbarasu, a builder who brought Stir, Airbnb, and Yale to the table. Together, they rebuilt the document stack with LLMs baked in from byte one.
They didn’t stop at building the sauce, they made it deployable. Extend just dropped a self-serve platform that lets engineering teams plug into document AI with the kind of speed that makes procurement delays feel prehistoric. You want accuracy? They’re clocking over 95%, even on degraded scans. Clients like Brex, Square, Checkr, Flatiron Health, Opendoor, and Vendr don’t sign up for mediocrity.
Behind the capital? Y Combinator (W23), Homebrew, Character, and angel investors like Scott Belsky, Guillermo Rauch, and Jeff Weinstein. Translation: this cap table doesn’t need hype, it already built half the modern dev stack.
Extend’s full-stack, LLM-native architecture does more than extract text, it dissects structure, classifies intent, validates the data, and feeds it back into a continuously fine-tuned loop. If old-school OCR was a fax machine, Extend is the neural spine of next-gen workflows.
$17M says technical teams want more than a tool, they want a partner that scales with the problem. Extend isn’t promising the moon, they’re delivering production-grade infrastructure to teams who don’t have time for hallucinations or half-measures.
