In this episode of The Connector Podcast, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Roel Verbeek, founder of Docapi – a spin‑out from the Belgian AI and cloud company Ixor. Roel explains that Docapi provides developer‑focused smart‑document processing APIs for financial documents such as invoices, receipts, payslips and PayPal receipts. The company offers two distinct APIs: one for unstructured PDFs using AI‑driven OCR, and another for structured documents that comply with the European Peppol e‑invoicing standard, which is becoming mandatory in Belgium by 2026 and across Europe. The conversation covers the strategic reasons for carving out Docapi – sharpening focus, separating brand identity from Ixor, and positioning for international growth, especially in Europe and Asia where Peppol adoption is rising, while noting the US market lacks a comparable VAT framework. Roel describes Docapi’s cloud‑native, serverless architecture on AWS that enables rapid scaling during peak VAT‑reporting periods and down‑scaling during low activity. He highlights the use of proprietary AI models that combine deep‑learning OCR with embedded financial‑knowledge validation, differentiating Docapi from generic AI tools like ChatGPT. The interview also touches on the company’s bootstrapped funding approach, openness to future investment to fuel international sales, and the developer‑centric value proposition of abstracting compliance and AI complexity. Contact details (docapi.io, LinkedIn, Xor address) are provided at the end.
Chapters
Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Cohen van der Huydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another podcast in close collaboration with Belgian fintech, and today I've got with me Rul. And Roel, can you please tell me who you are and who you work for? And I'm deliberately not mentioning the name of your company because I want to leave that for you.
Okay. Thank you, Koen. I'm Roel. I'm working for a company and founder of the company called Docapi. And Docapi is a new company created in October, and it's a spinout of the company Ixor. And Ixor is a general AI and cloud company, and we had a product that maybe your listeners know called Xerox Docs, and Docapi is the new name of Xerox Docs, and it's also the name of the company of the spin-out.
Because we already had you in the podcast before.
Yes, thank you.
So I was very curious now to learn a little bit more about the new company. So can you explain us and elaborate more? Take us on the journey, please.
Yes, yes. So it has been, it has been a year. So in this last year, have we created the company. And Docapri is smart document processing, smart document processing of financial documents, mainly financial documents, meaning an invoice, receipt, payslip, PayPal receipt, and so on and so on. And we do— we have now created basically 2 APIs in Docapri, 2 APIs for developers, because Docapri is really a developer-focused company. And we have 2 APIs for developers. One API is treating all the non-structured documents, which is like PDFs. We apply AI to recognize what is on a scanned invoice or a scanned receipt. And the second one is really structured financial documents, structured documents like the Peppol invoicing, things that are now really really a hot topic, I think, in the Belgian market.
No, no, absolutely. And I want to zoom into that a little bit later. What I'm still sort of looking for is why the carve-out?
Yeah, good question. The carve-out is basically to bring focus, to bring focus to as well our developers and our people working in the company, as well as to our customers. Our customers, I think for our customers it will be very clear what Docapi stands for, and we don't want any mistake between what Ixor is doing and what Docapi is doing. So focus is really one of the, of the main things, of the main reasons why we created Docapi, but also because Ixor is a Belgian company. Docapi is really created with an international focus too, and a growth focus too. We see that in Belgium. Yeah, we will talk maybe about invoicing afterwards, but that we are doing in Belgium around invoicing can really be used in Europe entirely and also Southeast Asia and Singapore and Japan and so on. So the second reason is really to have the focus also on the international part of the expansion.
But honestly, Roel, I think that's a general trend and a trend that should be welcomed is to sort of start your company with a global focus because it sort of makes sense in the landscape that we live.
Yeah, it is. It is. It is. And, and we are quite proud that we did it bootstrapped. So without announcing $100 million of investment.
Are you looking for investment?
We did it ourselves.
Yeah, that's great. But would you be open for investments?
Well, one of the reasons is maybe that in an international sales story, Yeah, money is, is burning fast. And so yeah, maybe, maybe it will be an opportunity to do this.
Yeah. I'm sure that also the audience is very curious why we sort of said we talk about what's happening in Belgium later. Maybe this is the time to maybe explain why and what's happening on the e-money— sorry, the e-invoicing in Belgium and more general than in Europe.
Yeah, yeah. Well, invoicing in Belgium, maybe I think your audience know already that invoicing will be an obligation starting in less than a year now. It sounds like a year, but it's basically very short. Yeah, 3 and a half quarters away. And it's only— it's an obligation between businesses, so business-to-business invoicing. But the same thing is happening in the rest of Europe. In there are some sometimes other deadlines and sometimes other technologies or platforms or options that are chosen. But the same thing is happening in different bases and different situations in all over Europe. But more recently, in like in November last year, there is also legislation voted called Vida. Vida stands for VAT in a digital age. So it's VAT reporting in the digital age, and it's voted that by 2020. It's still five years away. Five years away. Sixty quarters, I think. But still, the idea is that there is really an uniformization between the different countries concerning VAT reporting. So that's yeah, the the it's getting close to real-time reporting because the the idea is that. 10 days after you've provided the service, you have to issue the invoice. And 5 days after the invoice issuing, it should be sent through the platform and sent to the government too. So it's like a real-time VAT declaration.
So it's a hell of a transparent move of Europe.
It is, it is, it is, it is, it is. And it's always built on the technologies that we are building now. And that's, I I think the interesting part of what we do in Belgium now, because Belgium is sometimes not really happy with what's happening, what people are sometimes complaining of what's happening in Belgium. But for electronic invoicing, for e-invoicing, Belgium chose to really stick to a European standard called Peppol. And so there's no way around it. In Belgium, people need to in 2026 send their invoices and receive invoices through the Peppol network using the Peppol standards, which is for us a good thing because when we— everything we developed supporting these standards in a safe way, ISO certified and so on and so on and so on, can really be used in the rest of Europe and also in the future, in 5 years for Vida, for example.
And you mentioned global expansion, so Do you see a similar trend happening in Asia, Middle East, US?
Well, yes, yes, no.
Yes, yes, no. Okay.
So Middle East, Asia, Southeast Asia is really looking to Europe for all these standards. So Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. Yes, they're all looking for the same thing. US, no. There is in the US, in the US there is no, there is no VAT covering The entire United States. They are, they are, you know, no, no.
Maybe should, should make a better vote next time.
Yeah.
No, just joking.
2035 maybe.
Yeah, exactly. Let's see how that develops. Now, your company is for a long, long time in cloud and AI.
Yeah.
I'm working on documents and stuff. A lot of things are happening in cloud and a lot of things are happening in AI. What do you sort of see happening today and how does that in fact impact your business?
Yeah, well, yeah, a lot of happening is happening in cloud and AI. In cloud, it's really helping us. Cloud, well, we couldn't do what we do without a proper cloud provider. We use AWS. And without, there are possibilities where we have a completely serverless architecture, so we can scale really fast. So for example, when everybody is now doing VAT declarations now in the first January—
Exactly now.
Yeah, there is a lot of usage, so we can scale really up. But 20 days ago when it was Christmas, there was really not really a lot of activity, so we can scale down and Cloud is really helping us there, and there we use the term as standing on the giant shoulders. That's really helping us there. AI, same thing. Things are really evolving very quickly. We started using AI like 5, 6 years ago with our proper models and our own technology, and some of the things that we've done are thrown away for the moment. For example, The basic recognition of characters in an invoice is available widely. You can ask ChatGPT and it will tell you more or less what's in your invoice, but it will not tell you precisely every time what is the exact amount of VAT that you have to pay. So that's where we use our own models using the same also deep learning models, but applying financial knowledge and adding financial knowledge to these models. So yeah, we use the mixture of what's happening in the world and then our own additional own proprietary models to improve specifically the financial knowledge and validation on top of it.
So it's a combination. And I guess that's what you hear a lot nowadays is that many companies were using it, but the ones that they've— yeah, that The ones that actually stay relevant are those that actually make sense on the business, singly trained on a specific purpose.
Exactly. Yeah, that's what we think too. That's why we think that our focus on a payslip and an invoice and a receipt is a good thing.
Do you expect a lot of development on that side in terms of how AI could help you even further in doing this? Or do you think you're already in a sort of state of perfection?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Perfection? No, not yet. Certainly we can. Well, we have a lot of— we have put a lot of time into giving tools also to humans to more fine-tune our results. So sometimes, I know, the order is not on the invoice and people tend, for example, to copy the invoice number or something to an order. Label. And when people do this twice or 5 times, our models learn what people are doing and improve and just take what you're doing into the next time. And I think on this, we are now using AI also to like look at it and simulate validation using more general AI tools.
That makes a lot of sense. What sort of comes to mind is when we talk about cloud, there's a lot of collaboration, doing things together. But you also mentioned that you offer your services to a developers community. So how does that work?
Yes, yes. Well, Dokapi is really— its focus is really on helping developers with the difficulties from to hiding the difficulties from PEP pool or recognition and helping developers inserting or injecting this tech into whatever they have as bright ideas. We see a lot of people having good ideas on how to help butchers and smaller companies managing their invoices or their costs. And really a lot of People are taking the opportunity of evoicing to build these kind of tools. Well, we provide the tech to build in and to at least not worry about the compliances of Peppol or the difficulties of AI, but really focus on what you want to do and how do you want to help your customers. And that's why we think we are helping them a lot.
We're almost at the end, and obviously I want to just wish you all the best with the new company, Docapi.
Thank you.
But how can people contact you if they want to do business with you? Where do they need to be?
Yeah, of course there's our website docapi.io and you can always contact me also on LinkedIn, Roel Verbeek, Docapi. I'm also available on the Xor address, so you'll definitely find me.
A lot of ways that lead to Rome. Yeah. Thank you so much, Roel. Thank you. Thank you also to the audience and stay tuned. We'll come up with more fintech news.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Thanks for listening to another episode of The Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
