The Story of Rooom: The Company Building the Future of Intelligent Document Processing

The Story of Rooom: The Company Building the Future of Intelligent Document Processing

Every document processing company tells the same story: they saw the AI wave coming and built a solution. Hans Elstner’s story is different. He built Rooom before the AI boom, survived the pivot that almost killed the company, and emerged with something that actually matters.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hans shared the messy, unglamorous journey of building an enterprise AI platform—one that raised $19 million not through hype, but through solving a problem that every company faces but few can articulate.

The Automation Project That Revealed Everything

Rooom’s origin story doesn’t start with a bold vision or a Stanford dorm room epiphany. It starts with Hans and his co-founders doing unglamorous automation work for clients. “We built a lot of automation projects, classical automation projects with using some of the tools out there,” Hans recalls.

But something kept breaking. No matter how sophisticated their automation workflows, they kept hitting the same wall: documents. Invoices, contracts, forms—unstructured data that resisted automation. Every project revealed the same bottleneck.

“We realized that extracting data from documents was a big bottleneck,” Hans explains. “So we said, okay, this is actually the thing that we could bring the most value.”

That realization changed everything. Instead of building custom solutions forever, they would build a platform. They would solve document processing once, properly, for everyone.

The Technical Bet That Nobody Else Made

While competitors rushed to build no-code solutions for business users, Hans made a contrarian bet. Rooom would build for developers. “Our main target audience is actually more technical,” he says. “So we have a low code tool which is much more similar to like if you go on AWS or if you go on Anthropic and like, you know, you fiddle around with the API.”

This wasn’t just a positioning choice—it was a fundamental belief about how document processing should work. Business users wanted simplicity. But simplicity meant rigidity. The moment a document deviated from the template, the system broke.

Developers wanted something else: infrastructure. Give them the building blocks, and they’d construct whatever their business needed. Rooom became infrastructure for document processing, not a finished application.

The tradeoff was obvious. A smaller market. Longer sales cycles. But Hans didn’t blink. Technical buyers meant better retention, higher contract values, and customers who understood what they were building.

The Enterprise Transition Nobody Warns You About

As Rooom grew, Hans confronted a problem that breaks most startups: the enterprise credibility gap. Large companies wanted to buy from them, but only if they could prove they were already enterprise-ready.

“When you start going into larger enterprise, you don’t only need to be certified, you need to be audited by them,” Hans notes. “You need to go and prove them that you can actually operate at scale.”

It’s a vicious cycle. Enterprises want proof of scale before giving you business. But you can’t build proof of scale without enterprise business. Most startups die in this gap, burning cash on certifications and infrastructure that never pays off.

Hans found a different path: strategic believers. “We managed to get partners that kind of believed in us early on where we could show that we can operate at scale.” Those early enterprise customers became more than revenue—they became proof points. Each one made the next one easier.

The lesson? Enterprise transition isn’t just about product features or sales tactics. It’s about finding believers who will take a bet on you before you can prove you deserve it.

The Fundraising Philosophy That Changed Everything

When it came time to raise their Series A, Hans did something unusual. He turned down higher offers. Not because of valuation or terms, but because of philosophy.

“I just don’t like drama,” Hans says simply. “I just like to build sustainably.”

In a world obsessed with hockey-stick growth and billion-dollar valuations, Hans optimized for something else: sanity. He wanted investors who understood that 150% year-over-year growth was enough. That building sustainable infrastructure mattered more than viral growth loops.

“We wanted to build a sustainable business, not like burn through cash,” Hans explains. The result was a $19 million Series A that felt like a partnership rather than a pressure cooker. “We’re currently growing at a rate of like 150% year over year, which is not like the 10x, 100x that you sometimes hear in Silicon Valley. But it’s enough.”

This philosophy permeates everything at Rooom. They don’t chase every opportunity. They don’t pivot based on market hype. They build deliberately, focusing on problems they can solve uniquely well.

“I was not interested in like burning myself out,” Hans admits. It’s a refreshing honesty in an industry that celebrates sacrifice and sleepless nights.

The AI Moment They Were Built For

When large language models exploded in capability, Rooom was ready. Not because they predicted it, but because they’d built the right foundation. “We use foundation models under the hood,” Hans explains. “So in that sense, we use it like a developer would use like a programming language or a library.”

This positioning—as an orchestration layer above foundation models—protected them from the AI giants while letting them leverage their capabilities. Rooom doesn’t compete with OpenAI or Anthropic. They make those models useful for document processing.

The timing was fortuitous but not accidental. By focusing on infrastructure rather than applications, Rooom built something that could evolve with the technology. When better models emerged, they plugged them in. When new capabilities appeared, they incorporated them.

The Partner Network That Became Distribution

Rather than building a massive sales organization, Hans bet on partnerships. “We’re building integrations with a lot of the automation vendors out there,” he says. This transformed the competitive landscape. Instead of fighting with automation platforms, Rooom integrated with them.

The economics made sense. Partnership channels cost less than direct sales but reach more customers. Yes, you sacrifice margin. But you gain efficiency and speed. For a company optimizing for sustainable growth, it was the obvious choice.

The Future: Infrastructure for an AI-First World

Looking ahead, Hans sees Rooom becoming fundamental infrastructure. As AI permeates every business process, the need for intelligent document processing only grows. Contracts, invoices, forms, reports—every business runs on documents. Making those documents machine-readable is foundational.

But Hans isn’t chasing hype. He’s building infrastructure that will matter in five years, ten years, when the current AI frenzy has faded and what remains is actual utility. Document processing isn’t sexy. But it’s essential.

That’s the Rooom story. Not a tale of overnight success or viral growth, but of finding a genuine problem, building a sustainable solution, and refusing to compromise on values. It’s the story of a founder who chose sanity over spectacle—and built something that actually works.