Sam Bobley co-founded Ocrolus, the New York company that turns bank statements, pay stubs, and tax forms into clean data for lenders, and is its chief executive. He started it in 2014 from his parents’ kitchen.
Raised to Be an Entrepreneur
Bobley grew up watching his father build and scale a payments company called Phonecharge, which was sold in 2006 while Bobley was in high school. He has said he was trained to be an entrepreneur from childhood and wanted to follow his father into financial technology.
The idea for Ocrolus came while he was at the University of South Carolina. His father mentioned a meeting with an elder law attorney who complained about reviewing thousands of pages of bank statements for every long-term care Medicaid application, which requires 60 months of financial records. Lawyers and paralegals were going through them line by line with a highlighter.
The CAPTCHA Insight
Bobley and a friend from high school treated it as a research project at the kitchen table. Existing software could read documents only 60 to 80 percent of the time, because statements arrive as scans, faxes, and phone photos from thousands of banks, each with its own layout.
The breakthrough came from Google’s CAPTCHA. Google had used people typing distorted words to finish digitizing books its scanners failed to read. Ocrolus applied the same idea: machines handle what they can read with confidence, and people verify the rest. That waterfall of automation and human review let it deliver data at 99 percent accuracy.
From Medicaid Files to Mainstream Lending
The company found its market in small business lending, where lenders rely on bank statements to judge cash flow, and it helped many lenders process loans during the Paycheck Protection Program. Investors followed, with an $80 million round in 2021, and customers came to include Brex, LendingClub, PayPal, and SoFi.
Ocrolus has since moved into consumer and mortgage lending and added fraud detection for edited documents, now analyzing about 750,000 credit applications a month. On Fintech One-on-One he has explained why humans stay in the loop. The kitchen-table question still drives the company: why should anyone read a bank statement by hand?
