Irish startup Plendi, which helps people track their business expenses using their mobiles, has secured a €50,000 seed investment from Enterprise Ireland’s Internet and Games Competitive Start Fund.
The Dublin-based company, whose launch we covered 4 months ago, is a sort of Mechanical Turk for transcribing paper receipts. Available for iPhone and Android, the app works as follows: You take a photo of a receipt and Plendi’s data entry staff put the data into a personal online receipt manager, where both the image and transaction details – vendor, date, currency, net, VAT and total – are permanently stored.
It’s similar to other receipt online lockers but shuns OCR for the flexibility of using human labour. That comes at a cost, of course. The service is subscription-based, costing from €39.95 per year.
To that end, Fergal Murray, Plendi CEO, says that in 4 months the company has expanded to 20 countries, with the new investment penned to further develop Plendi’s technology and more widely market the service.
A BlackBerry app will be released in April 2011, says Plendi, which seems like a natural fit for a business-oriented service. Competitors include Expensify and Expensecloud.