Lector

The solution Lector AI enables fully automated processing of incoming documents. Lector helps large organisations to use AI to classify all incoming documents, such as letters, emails and uploads in apps and to automatically extract information from them. The use of open-source technologies, the integration of managed services and the high scalability of the infrastructure enable time savings of over 80 per cent, as well as first-class service quality and maximum customer satisfaction.

Lector is a platform for intelligent document processing. More than 60 active corporate customers, including over 25 health insurance companies, are using the AI-based solution for a wide range of processes. In total, over 500 million pages have already been processed at the platform. Customers achieve massive time savings for their employees and a smooth, secure process to automate all incoming messages via mail and digital channels.

Wanted: Trustworthy cloud infrastructure for highly scalable AI processes in Germany

Until migrating to OVHcloud, Lector operated its productive cloud services with one of the major American cloud providers, relying on Kubernetes and virtual machines. Three key issues were hindering them from scaling up further: Managed open source services such as MongoDB and Kafka could not be integrated. In addition, traffic costs were high and many customers simply had trust issues because the original provider was not based in Europe.

Compliance with GDPR and many criteria for data sovereignty are essential, especially for German health insurance companies and public authorities, but also for many private companies. The change was inevitable in order to continue to be a reliable driver of innovation.

Found: European managed cloud services, flexible scalability and business support

Lector worked with OVHcloud to implement managed Kubernetes clusters and S3-compatible Object Storage, allowing all documents to be stored without scaling limitations. Lector uses various AI services for document processing and editing, including AI Training, AI Deploy, and AI Endpoint.

The system is operated in the German data centre of OVHcloud, with guaranteed reliability and high availability – especially for GPU and database nodes. The entire infrastructure can be monitored centrally; all relevant metrics are visible thanks to native support for Prometheus, which is a major added value over other cloud providers, especially for managed services.

‘AI Endpoints provides flexible access to different AI models. This flexibility ensures the future viability of our company and strengthens our innovative power for development of our own analysis tools and our business intelligence through data platform.’

Dr. Benjamin von Ardenne, founder and managing director of lector.ai GmbH

Increased efficiency through automation and focus

By using OVHcloud's Managed Services, the team spends significantly less time operating and scaling Kafka and MongoDB. Instead, they can focus entirely on further developing the platform and the application. OVHcloud's startup programme proved to be a springboard, enabling the team to test and evaluate a wide range of services and facilitating easy exchange with the AI and cloud infrastructure community.

‘Lector is the AI platform that processes incoming documents fully automatically – from cleaning and classification to precise data extraction. The advanced AI understands every type of document and saves companies valuable time and resources through a simple and scalable process.’

Dr. Benjamin von Ardenne, founder and managing director of lector.ai GmbH

Hosting Lector's cloud infrastructure in a sovereign European cloud also brings significant benefits for Lector's customers. They now know that their data and documents are well managed and trust in European technology.

Find more information about Lector.