The Neat Company adds new Center City Philadelphia office location, with room for up to 140 employees

Tom Paine
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The Neat Company, which provides scanning products and services for items such as receipts and business cards, announced yesterday that it had opened a second office in Center City Philadelphia that essentially will serve as a call center for inside sales and customer service, configured for up to 140 employees. The new office is located in the Ten Penn Center building at 1801 Market Street. Neat's headquarters, located at 1601 Market Street, houses about 80 employees, and 40 are already working in the new office. Neat expects that employment at the new location will grow to exceed 100 people over the next several months. Neat moved its headquarters from West Philly to Center City last year.

The expansion reflects two factors, Neat's Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Garton told me in a phone interview. One is a strategic decision by the company is to take all sales and customer service-related functions in house, where some had previously been outsourced, and to make a long-term commitment to centralizing all its operations in the US, and in particular the city of Philadelphia. (The company does contract out manufacturing of its NeatDesk and NeatReceipts hardware products and most of that is done in China.) "While some companies decide to move sales and customer service teams offshore, we felt it was important to support local jobs and stay in Philadelphia", Garton said in a prepared statement. Neat will receive some tax credits related to job training for adding jobs in the city.

The second is the continuing growth of Neat, accelerating since the introduction of its cloud and mobile offerings (NeatCloud and NeatMobile) in July. The new products open the potential for Neat to significantly expand its customer base, and favor the use of a more direct channel with customers and prospects. Garton says Neat ran out off space long before it expected.

Garton declined to reveal how the cloud and mobile offerings were selling so far, but did say more details and additional product enhancements would be announced at CES 13 in January.

In an interview last December with the Philadelphia Business Journal, Neat CEO Jim Foster said he expected 2011 revenue to exceed $65 million, and estimated that revenue growth this year would be 40%. He also said the company had been profitable in 2010 and 2011.

Neat's principle investors have been Edison Ventures and MentorTech Ventures. It was founded in 2002 by Rafi Spero and his father, serial entrepreneur Les Spero, who are still major shareholders.



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The Neat Company introduces its first Cloud, Mobile offerings

Tom Paine

Philadelphia-based The Neat Company, the pioneer in providing technology for scanning and digitizing information from paper sources such as receipts and business cards, today announced the general availability of NeatCloud and NeatMobile, two products that could potentially be transformative for its business, said Neat Company Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Garton in an interview with Philly Tech News. The products had been previewed in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and have been in private beta since.

NeatCloud will be priced at three tiers between $5.99 and $24.99 per month depending upon the number of users. It is intended to be a cloud-based digital filing system not only for data that originates from paper sources but also for other data that comes directly from digital sources. It will run off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 platform.

NeatMobile, which will initially be available for iOS only (an Android version is scheduled for August, the company says), will enable users to take photos of paper documents with the cameras in their mobile devices, from which the content can then be converted into digitized information fields using optical character recognition (OCR). It is available for download from the Apple App Store and is available free of charge to those subscribing to the two highest tiers of the NeatCloud service.







Among the features of its Digital Filing System Neat emphasizes are its abilities to sync Neat data across all devices, to share files or folders with whomever one chooses, to create Neat email addresses through NeatCloud and request vendors or others send receipts or documents directly into your Neat Digital Filing System, and secure backup.

Another feature of NeatCloud is its expanded search capability, through which Neat users can now find information they may have stored in multiple cloud services including Google Docs, Dropbox and Evernote. Users can search across their different cloud services from a single Neat interface.

Neat is also introducing NeatVerify, a subscription service somewhat like that provided by LinkedIn's CardMunch. Blurry or faded images that can't be deduced through OCR receive human verification if necessary.

These new offerings by no means replace Neat's existing NeatDesk and NeatReciepts scanner products, although I could see the possibility of that eventually largely being the case. NeatDesk retails for about $400, NeatReciepts for about $200. The company says it has sold about 1 million of the two devices combined. The aspect that would be difficult to replace would be NeatDesk's capability for scanning a large volume of documents. But for many smaller customers, NeatCloud and NeatMobile could provide the complete solution. Overall, the new offerings should make Neat more hardware independent and more retail channel independent in the long run, and give it greater potential for broadening its customer base.

Garton said while there are other larger players in the Cloud document repository and backup market, Neat planned to focus primarily on the applications it (and its software) know best: receipts and business card information. However, moving into the Cloud should give Neat considerably more ability to integrate that information with other sources and collaboration tools. Garton also said Neat would continue to concentrate on the Soho (small office, home office) market.

After hitting a brief trough in 2009 following several years of rapid growth, The Neat Company's 2010 revenue was $33.3 million, according to its listing in the 2011 Inc. 5000. An article in the Philadelphia Business Journal in late 2011, citing CEO Jim Foster, said 2011 sales were expected to reach $65 million with additional growth of 40% anticipated in 2012. However, the turn towards mobile apps for handling the types of things Neat Company does in turning paper input into digital information has been dramatic in recent years, presumably necessitating Neat's response with the new offerings.

Edison Ventures has been the primary investor in The Neat Company, along with MentorTech Ventures.


Neat press release



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