Tech Innovator Set to Disrupt Records Management Industry with Promising New Company

Q. How many companies has Alex Fielding founded?

A. Alex Fielding has founded two companies:

• Wheels of Zeus, a company which aimed to bring to market a compact, competitively priced GPS consumer system that could track critical assets, pets and people. In addition, the company explored RFID technology

• Ripcord Inc., a company which seeks to revolutionize the digital records management industry.

Q. Where has Alex Fielding worked?

A. Alex Fielding has worked in many top technology companies, including:

• Apple

• Cisco Systems

• DEC

• Cadence

• Exodus Communications

• Tri-Valley Data Centers

• Wheels of Zeus

• Ripcord Networks

• Power Assure

• NASA

• Piston Cloud Computing

• Vigilant

• Ripcord, Inc.

Q. What is Ripcord?

A. As the world’s first robotic records-digitization company, Ripcord, Inc. is on a mission to create a paperless workplace. The company seeks to create next-generation technology with a small but exceptional team which strives to excel at enabling private conversations across the globe. By using state-of-the-art automation and software, Ripcord seeks to provide customers with affordable records management solutions that are secure, fast and all-inclusive.

Q. What organizations is Alex Fielding affiliated with?

Alex Fielding is affiliated with many organizations, including:

• The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

• Code Warriors Foundation

• California Women Empowering Women (CAWEW), a 501c3 nonprofit

• Ripcord

• AstraSpace, where he sits on the advisory board

• TEDMED

• TED WED

• Network Physics

Alex Fielding: Career History

Fielding’s career started in the 1990s, when he served in engineering capacities at several companies. He worked in engineering management for network drivers at Apple, also picking up experience in network server engineering and quality assurance, and also spent time at Cisco Systems, DEC, and Cadence. During his time at Cisco and Apple, he worked on multiple generations of MacOS, PowerBook, and network servers and was part of the first iMac team.

Shortly after leaving Apple, Fielding joined Exodus Communications under the leadership of Ellen Hancock, a former Apple CTO who served as Exodus’ CEO. At Exodus, he worked in network engineering management as the West Coast Manager of the Platinum Team, supporting the world’s largest data network at the time. Following his time at Exodus, Fielding assumed his first CTO role in data center infrastructure management in 2001 at Tri-Valley Data Centers, an East Bay-area data center and colocation company.

Also in 2001, Fielding embarked on his first entrepreneurial venture with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The company he founded, Wheels of Zeus, aimed to bring to market a compact, competitively priced GPS consumer system that could track critical assets, pets and people. In addition, the company explored RFID technology. Venture-funded by Mobius and DFJ, Wheels of Zeus was sold to Zontrak in 2006.

In 2004, Fielding became CEO of encryption products company Ripcord Networks, a position he held through 2009. In 2009, he returned to a CTO role as CTO of Federal and Vice-President of Business Development at Power Assure. He architected technology solutions for the U.S. government and created a global partner strategy for the company by collaborating with its biggest partners, including Dell, ABB, VMWare, Intel, Cisco, UL, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Universal Electric, Raritan, Dominion, and IBM.

Using Power Assure’s proprietary platform and technology, data center operators were able to improve the reliability and functionality of applications while making them highly portable. This was accomplished by tying compute load and resource availability utilization to physical, logical and virtualized infrastructure.

Power Assure was highly successful in these pursuits, becoming a three-time winner of the Clean Tech Open, Red Herring 100, and Data Center Europe Award for Change & Innovation. They also received a $5M Department of Energy grant.

During and after Fielding’s time at Power Assure, Fielding collaborated with NASA from September 2010 to 2015. As an agency direct contractor, he was responsible for facilitating the deployment of Power Assure technology across 87 NASA data centers

while also working with NASA’s OCIO on data center consolidation technology.

During this time, Fielding also served as advisor to the CTO at Piston Cloud Computing between 2011 and 2014. During this period, the Piston team was still based at NASA Ames, prior to the partnership between RackSpace and NASA which launched OpenStack. The company was eventually sold to Cisco Systems.

Finally, in 2013, Fielding spent a year as Vice-President of Federal & Energy at Vigilant, a mission-critical cooling company. In 2014, after years of dabbling in company affairs, he formally co-founded Ripcord, Inc., the world’s first robotic records digitization company. Currently, Fielding sits as CEO, co-founder and board member of Ripcord, Inc.

Ripcord Biography: Company Description

As the world’s first robotic records digitization company, Ripcord, Inc. is on a mission to create a paperless workplace. The company seeks to create next-generation technology with a small but exceptional team which strives to excel at enabling private conversations across the globe. By using state-of-the-art automation and software, Ripcord seeks to provide customers with affordable records management solutions that are secure, fast and all-inclusive.

Ripcord was the first company to apply vision robotics to paper records digitization. As Fielding recently explained, “Ripcord disrupts the industry by building robots to automate what has been, until now, an inefficient and error-prone process. There will be no more holding records hostage in massive warehouses or nickel-and-diming customers at every step in the digitization process. Scanning, indexing, storing in the cloud, connecting to other enterprise applications… these things should be seamless and priced inclusively. And now they are.”

The company aims to reduce the costs of human labor involved in records management and improve efficiency, information security and the productive use of office space that is usually monopolized by reams of paper. By using robots and artificial intelligence to scan and classify paper records, inefficient files can be transformed into meaningful data. Sophisticated software uploads data to the cloud, loads it into corporate databases and uncovers useful insights that can be used to improve corporate activities. In addition, it makes data searchable via companies’ existing data systems.

Based in Hayward, CA, Ripcord operates out of a 30,000-square-foot factory space in the San Francisco Bay area. Using massive machines that are made by the company domestically using U.S. companies, Ripcord processes hundreds of millions of records per year. These machines are capable of removing staples and other paper fasteners, scanning a variety of differently sized papers and categorizing files using contextual clues, technologies that competing companies have not yet mastered.

Companies initiate the digitization process by packing their records into boxes and affixing barcoded labels with custom personalized metadata. Upon receipt, Ripcord employees scan the sides of each box and place it into the custom-built machines, which perform most of the clerical work. Once the paper records are scanned and uploaded, they are converted into searchable digital PDFs which are stored on AWS. The file itself is shredded.

Ripcord says that the entire digitization process is around 80 percent automated, with machine-executed tasks including records handling, the removal of fasteners like staples, and scanning. The company claims that its process is 10x faster than human-based scanning, and the number of files per day that can be processed is over 50 million.

Fielding identifies the job roles of Ripcord warehouse employees as “curatorial” and is adamant about the importance of using automation to improve the work lives of his employees. “People really suck at scanning paper,” he says. “Nobody grew up dreaming of being a human staple remover. We still use people to operate the machines. but that piece of the process is really letting machines do what they do best and let people do what they do best.”

In terms of pricing, digitization fees start at $0.004 per page, per month. These fees include all parts of the digitization process, spanning transportation, scanning and search functions. These fees are highly competitive, beating out many other companies currently on the market. Ripcord has scanned over 1 billion records since its inception and has been successful in attracting high-profile clients with this technology, including Coca-Cola Co.

Many other companies are exploring the possibility of using automation to improve the supply chain. For example, French robotics startup Exotec recently raised $3.5 million to build a fleet of mobile robots to help with warehouse functions, while Pittsburgh-based Bossa Nova Robotics raised $14 million for its retail-oriented robotics technology. Ripcord currently leads the pack in terms of records digitization, however, and shows no signs of stopping.

Fielding’s journey with Ripcord started in 2004, when he became CEO of the encryption products company Ripcord Networks along with Apple CEO Gil Amelio, Apple CTO Ellen Hancock, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on the board of directors. In this incarnation, the company existed through about 2009, when its assets were acquired by another company in an undisclosed transaction.

The company was resuscitated in 2014, when Fielding assumed the role of co-founder. He founded Ripcord, Inc., after hearing several horror stories about competitor companies who were improperly implementing records management solutions.

Fielding’s goal was to use vision-guided robotics, industrial automation and advanced sensors to revolutionize the digitization of

corporate paper records. Through this process, he sought to build a ground-up solution for a “truly paperless workplace,” saving companies millions of dollars in time and effort.

For several years, Ripcord, Inc. operated mostly under the radar, acquiring clients through word-of-mouth recommendations. During this time, the company managed to attract several high-profile clients. In March 2017, Ripcord announced $9.5 million in Series A venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Lux Capital, Legend Star, and Steve Wozniak. By November 2017, that number had risen to $75M and included funding from Google Ventures, Icon Ventures, Baidu, Telstra, SVB Capital and Singularity.

Alex Fielding sits on the board of directors of many organizations, including:

• The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

• Code Warriors Foundation

• California Women Empowering Women (CAWEW), a 501c3 nonprofit

• Ripcord

He advises several organizations, including:

• AstraSpace, where he sits on the advisory board

• TEDMED

• TED WED

• Network Physics

• Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office