For years, everyone in the industrialized world has struggled to keep track of tiny pieces of paper. Receipts. Business cards. Recipes. Bills.
When Les Spero and his son Rafi founded
Neat in Philadelphia in 2002, the company was built on the idea that thanks to scanning technology, there was no longer any reason for businesses and individuals to deal with paper documents, and their tendency to be misplaced.
Its first product, NeatReceipts, paired scanning hardware with software that organized and digitally managed the scanned information. The small company sold its wares at kiosks and through direct-sales programs.
"They quickly found out there was a growing base of people who liked the product," explains Ron Kaiser, Neat's interim CEO.
That base has continued to grow over the years -- Neat has sold more than $2 million worth of its scanner/software packages. The company's products are available in more than 7,000 retail centers, from Best Buy and Staples to Sam's Club, as well as through Amazon and directly from
neat.com.
People use Neat for everything from managing household budgets (including taxes and kids' activities) to planning weddings; the elegant desktop scanner and efficient software also helps cooks, contractors and other self-employed service providers streamline their businesses.
In 2009, Jim Foster was brought in as CEO as the Speros became less active (they continue to be shareholders; Rafi sits on the board of directors and has helped Kaiser build strategic alliances). Then Edison Ventures took an interest in the company and helped take it to a new level.
The company launched a
DIRECTV campaign to grow their customer base. They produced both MAC and Windows versions of the product, allowing people to capture, organize and dispatch data for reports at home as well as at work.
Along the way, as technology became more sophisticated, Neat's products evolved. In 2012, the company launched
Neat Cloud -- customers can use their mobile devices to take pictures of invoices and receipts, uploading them into an organizational system that makes reports available through the cloud.
In October 2013,
NeatConnect arrived: a cloud scanner that scans directly to Neat and other cloud services such as Dropbox, wirelessly, without the need for a computer.
And at the end of September,
HP announced that its new
Officejet 8040 e-All-in-One printer scans directly to Neat.
"We're beginning to provide our software on top of anybody else's hardware, ushering in a new era of opportunity for the company," explains Kaiser.
Neat has received many accolades over the years, including the
iF Product Design Award for NeatConnect; an
Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Neat CEO Jim Foster; the
NAPO Organizers' Choice Award for Best Solution for Organizing Information at Work;
Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technology (PACT) Technology Company of the Year; and designation as a Mid-Atlantic Top 100 Company.
Kaiser -- who in his 35-year career in high-tech manufacturing, software and life sciences has taken six companies public -- joined Neat's board of directors in 2012 and became interim CEO in 2013.
"My role was to help build some of the infrastructure necessary to become a company that offers software to customers on hardware beyond our own," he explains.
The board is currently searching for a new CEO who will continue to help the company grow.
"We're also actively looking for individuals to join our team," adds Kaiser.
This story originally appeared in our sister publication Keystone Edge.