fileAI: leveraging agentic AI to automate business data and workflows 

A new path

Fifteen months into a job with an investment bank, Christian Schneider wanted out. It wasn’t that he hated it exactly, “it just wasn’t a very exciting place to be.” The economics graduate from Germany had fallen into the obvious career track, but just as he was finding his footing in finance, the tech sector was starting to pop. Headline-grabbing incubators like Rocket Internet were catching his eye. Friends working at startups were telling him about growth rates of hundred per cent week-on-week.  “It was intriguing,” he says. “Fast moving.” 

It was around 2013-2014. Schneider and his team were in Canary Wharf, London, deep in a new merger deal, when he got a call from a friend – a former banker – who was running an e-commerce startup in Asia. “He said, ‘yeah…it’s happening in tech,’” says Schneider. He didn’t need further persuasion. He packed in his job, jumped into a position as a business intelligence manager at his friend’s company, and set himself on a new path, chasing success in a sector with a “completely different spirit and vibe”. 

Today, Schneider, 35, is the founder of fileAI, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate complex, often tedious, business data and workflows. In February it raised $14m in Series A (led by investors including Antler Elevate, Illuminate Financial, Insignia and Heinemann Group), bringing its total raised to $20m. Founded in 2021, fileAI has grown into a company with a team of 70. It counts MS&AD, Toshiba, KFC, DirectAsia, and Nippon, among its clients – helping them process over 200 million files annually.

Making the leap to become a founder

Once Schneider (who was already a dab hand at stats and coding) had taken that step into his first tech job, making the leap to becoming a founder was surprisingly easy. The startup world is just “crazy”, he says. “It’s all just guessing games…theories…every day you might be proven wrong and have to go back to a certain point again.” Once he learned to appreciate the chaos, his confidence grew. And after he helped support the startup he was working at through a successful funding round, he realised, “I think I could technically do that myself.”‍

Soon after, he had the opportunity to put it to the test, when he co-founded DishDash, a B2B procurement platform to help businesses manageF&B within their offices . It ran for four years, hitting $10m revenue at its peak, before falling victim to the decline in interest in food-tech that happened around 2018. That was when Deliveroo and UberEats faltered on the stock market, and Schnieder struggled to secure the investment needed to keep his startup progressing. It was a taste of the rollercoaster ride of running a startup. “I wouldn't brand it as a failure, not at all,” he says. “But I would definitely say that I learned what wrong place, wrong time really means.”

The spark behind fileAI

Schneider began looking for new ideas. Running DishDash, his team had spotted a pain point. “When we were dealing with large enterprises we had a hard time getting the data in shape for them to just sign off on it. We’d go about facilitating deliveries and orders for them and at the end of the month they needed to reconcile all of that and it took forever until we got our money. We were always quite frustrated with that process…” That, he says, “was the spark”. Schneider saw that there was a commercial opportunity in providing an automated reconciliation feature for big businesses, and the seed for fileAI was born. 

With the help of a handful of developers, Schneider built an MVP and began scoping out interest from possible clients. As it developed, he realised that what he was approaching from an accounting, bookkeeping problem, was actually a data problem. “That encouraged me to broaden that scope a little bit in terms of,  what does the tool have to look like? And that really is what fileAI is now all about. It's a data preparation tool.” 

Getting upfront capital to develop the tech was crucial, but so too were the leaps in artificial intelligence happening simultaneously. When Schneider started building fileAI the AI components were strictly predictive. About 18 months in, generative AI suddenly became available.  “It changed the game for us,” he says. “All of a sudden, we had access to that tool that could transform data on the fly within the processing pipeline. It could understand the data, potentially correct it, modify it. That was crazy.”

And with the help of generative AI, the predictability accuracy of fileAI jumped from 60% to way over 90% – dramatically reducing the amount of human oversight required in a workflow and making the product significantly more appealing to clients. “It was clear that there was no way back for us,” he says. “We have to go all the way in on this and it has to become a core component of what we're doing.” 

The potential for AI is now so huge, he says, that he feels like the company needs to exercise restraint. “We almost have to sort of hold back on our ambition a little bit and make it very tangible, all about impact ROI and simple to implement, rather than launch into a huge claim about how AI can take you to Mars,” he says. “We want to be recognized as a brand and that usually can only be achieved with, you know, millions of people knowing and using your product. Therefore it has to be very easy, and not scary either.”

Building with Antler 

Antler was, Schneider says, there from the beginning, and has “played an incredible role.” Today, fileAI has expanded from Singapore to establish offices in Japan, Australia and the US. It’s pulling in over $3m revenue – the aim is to triple it within the next few months. But when he first connected with Antler, the start up just had a handful of customers. After he completed the residency program in Singapore, “they funded me as a first investor and also immediately brought in another investor who was also very keen to join…so Antler was pivotal for this business.” 

He also feels like he’s part of a bigger movement in tech. “The idea of Antler is incredibly innovative in itself, but it sparks even more innovation,” says Schneider. “There was a massive stronghold from US incubators holding all of the reins around funding cool startups… but Antler has wedged in there and changed things. That’s the reason why products like mine and others exist.”

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