that's cool and is it a horizontal like like where you have so let's back up a second so doxus has been i think it's been around for a long time right how long has doxus been around and and like how how has it evolved right and how long have you been yeah

Yeah, so I've been here about five years.

And I regard it, I feel a little bit like I stumbled into this, you know, incredible uncut diamond, if you like, of a resource.

And I'll explain a bit more about that in a moment.

But DOCSIS was previously called SER Group.

And the company's been around 40 years and always at the cutting edge of document management but when i when i was introduced to the business this is like a very common story in germany so germany is an unbelievable it's a german headquartered business unbelievable um region for entrepreneurs starting software companies now often they don't get out of germany or out of what they call the dac region the german speaking region and because you know just for whatever reason crossing the chasm into say the US doesn't always happen for cultural reasons but it's an unbelievable place where entrepreneurs start businesses grow them and often they can't take it to the next level and this business had been sold by a sort of aging owner to private equity and I've it was a private equity firm I've worked with four or five times before called the Carlisle Group and I it was actually Carlisle that backed my business at Palmer going back to those days, you know, and it was the guy who just joined Carlisle called Michael Wand.

And he had, uh, uh, decided to back this, you know, idiot, um, unknown, uh, uh, entrepreneur, uh, because he, he liked entrepreneurs.

And you're getting hit up by a thousand vendors right now in each of those categories that you just went through, how, What would your advice be to heads of department, the C-suite, you know, who heads up each of those divisions? What would your advice be to them when they're evaluating these AI companies, right? Like yours, right? How should they approach it?

What problem are you trying to solve for enterprises, and why is it so critical right now?

The problem that we're trying to solve really is how can you maximize your team and make them 100 times more productive when they're managing documents? And documents are really still the lifeblood of businesses.

Every day, billions of documents flow into enterprises, whether it be invoices, orders, resumes, you name it.

They're, they're, they're driving docum- driving businesses with documents, and businesses have to store them, have to find, have to search them, have to generate new ones, have to communicate them, have to interact with them, have to do all... collaborate with them.

So this is a massive problem.

It's a massive productivity problem, and there's a whole load of legacy platforms out there that are just not bringing us into the, the new era.

Because what you really need to do is automate the whole document life cycle, from the understanding of documents, automating that with AI, to the automation of processes around documents, to being able to store documents in a massive scale.

Jon, with AI increasingly embedded in enterprise software, how should organizations think about balancing automation with control, governance, and business value?

and talking about investment you sold the business during covet So what actually looked like at the time, you know, being courageous enough, looking for investment, looking for money, selling a business in a moment where everything was shutting down or, you know, the level of appetite to risk was at the lowest for everybody, right? Because health and safety was number one priority for everybody.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I sold a business called Eggplant during that COVID period.

And it was the initial period of COVID.

And Eggplant was a brilliant business.

In fact, if you've just watched the... mission to go around the moon with the, you know, the capsule, the Orion spacecraft.

It's carried those four fantastic astronauts around the moon.

So what has been some learnings for you?