Rossum emerged from Prague’s artificial intelligence research community rather than from a conventional business school founder network. Tomáš Gogár met Petr Baudiš and Tomáš Tunys while working around AI and machine learning research, and the three eventually focused on a mundane but enormous business problem: extracting structured information from documents.
Rossum’s early company materials describe the founders as former AI PhD students. That background mattered because the company was built around a technical conviction that document processing did not need to depend on rigid templates and repetitive manual data entry.
A difficult technical problem with obvious business value
Invoices and business documents are not glamorous, but that was part of the opportunity. Large companies spend vast amounts of time moving information from PDFs, forms and emails into other systems. Even modest improvements in speed and accuracy can therefore create measurable savings.
Rossum developed its technology in Prague and positioned machine learning as a way to make document capture more flexible. This is one of the region’s strongest patterns: using deep technical talent on operational problems where customers can clearly calculate the return.
Three technical founders with a research base
Gogár has described meeting Baudiš and Tunys during his academic work and recognising that their research skills could be applied to a product of their own. Baudiš had already contributed to work connected with Google’s AlphaGo research, while all three founders had experience in machine learning and structured data extraction.
That gave Rossum credibility at a time when enterprise AI was still a much less mature category than it is today. The company was not adding an AI label to an existing workflow. Its founding thesis was that advances in machine learning could replace an older approach to document automation.
From Prague startup to Coupa acquisition
In May 2026, Rossum announced that it had been acquired by Coupa. Gogár described the deal as the next chapter of a nine-year journey and said the combination would embed Rossum’s technology more deeply into a major spend-management platform.
An acquisition is not the only measure of startup success, but this one is significant for Czech AI. It shows a research-heavy company from Prague building technology valuable enough to become part of a large international enterprise software platform.
What Rossum says about Czech AI
Czechia has long had strong technical universities and research communities. The harder challenge has been converting that knowledge into companies with global distribution and commercial durability. Rossum is one of the clearest examples of that conversion working.
The founders built around a specialised problem, raised international capital, developed enterprise customers and eventually reached a strategic buyer. For the next generation of Czech AI founders, the encouraging part is that the company’s edge began with local research talent and a willingness to apply it to an unfashionable but valuable business workflow.