Hanji is an API for turning messy source documents (scans, faxes, handwritten forms, degraded government paperwork, dense tables) into structured data that downstream AI systems can actually use. The company is aimed at healthcare, insurance, and government teams , groups that tend to either maintain brittle in-house parsing pipelines or accept fixed tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, and latency from off-the-shelf providers. Hanji's pitch is that those three dials can be tuned per customer, with the vendor doing the tuning against the customer's actual document mix.
The launch matters now because document extraction has become the bottleneck for a lot of AI applications in regulated industries, and generic OCR or single-model pipelines break on the exact edge cases (handwriting, faxes, broken tables) that these workflows depend on. The team frames Hanji around a playground you can try on real documents and a short onboarding where they tune the pipeline to a specific corpus, citing case work like lifting text accuracy from 71 percent to 96.5 percent for one healthcare customer, cutting end-to-end latency from 90 seconds to under a minute for another, and reducing processing cost by 75 percent for a third by adding a routing step.
Hanji is built by Achyut Krishna Byanjankar, Soami Kapadia, and David Yu , part of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch. The founders previously built YouLearn, an AI tutor used by millions of students, where processing textbooks, handwritten notes, and scanned documents at scale is what pushed them to build the underlying parser that became Hanji.
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Priya RanganathanJul 29, 2026
The fax reference in the copy is doing heavy lifting. Every ops team at a hospital or insurer just perked up because yes, they still receive faxes in 2025.
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Tomáš K.Jul 29, 2026
Going from consumer edtech to enterprise doc pipelines is a wild pivot arc. Respect for choosing the least sexy problem with the fattest wallets attached.
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Kwesi O.Jul 29, 2026
Nice landing page but the demo GIF cuts before showing a truly gnarly doc. Show me a coffee-stained handwritten insurance claim from 1997 or I'm not sold.
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Mika NodaJul 29, 2026
Curious what your P95 latency looks like on multi-page scans with mixed handwriting. 'Pipeline tuned for accuracy, speed, and cost' is the trilemma every OCR startup claims to solve.
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Rafael VasquezJul 29, 2026
Tagline rewrite, on the house: 'Messy documents in, clean data out.' You're welcome, David.
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Linnea SvärdstromJul 29, 2026
Before anyone in regulated industries touches this: where does the data sit, who trains on it, and is there a BAA? Would love to see that surfaced above the fold.
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obiJul 29, 2026
Two screenshots and one sentence for a YC launch tweet is bold. Either supreme confidence or you ran out of Canva credits, either way it worked because I clicked.
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Hanji is an API for turning messy source documents (scans, faxes, handwritten forms, degraded government paperwork, dense tables) into structured data that downstream AI systems can actually use. The company is aimed at healthcare, insurance, and government teams , groups that tend to either maintain brittle in-house parsing pipelines or accept fixed tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, and latency from off-the-shelf providers. Hanji's pitch is that those three dials can be tuned per customer, with the vendor doing the tuning against the customer's actual document mix. The launch matters now because document extraction has become the bottleneck for a lot of AI applications in regulated industries, and generic OCR or single-model pipelines break on the exact edge cases (handwriting, faxes, broken tables) that these workflows depend on. The team frames Hanji around a playground you can try on real documents and a short onboarding where they tune the pipeline to a specific corpus, citing case work like lifting text accuracy from 71 percent to 96.5 percent for one healthcare customer, cutting end-to-end latency from 90 seconds to under a minute for another, and reducing processing cost by 75 percent for a third by adding a routing step. Hanji is built by Achyut Krishna Byanjankar, Soami Kapadia, and David Yu , part of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch. The founders previously built YouLearn, an AI tutor used by millions of students, where processing textbooks, handwritten notes, and scanned documents at scale is what pushed them to build the underlying parser that became Hanji.
Comments (7)
The fax reference in the copy is doing heavy lifting. Every ops team at a hospital or insurer just perked up because yes, they still receive faxes in 2025.
Going from consumer edtech to enterprise doc pipelines is a wild pivot arc. Respect for choosing the least sexy problem with the fattest wallets attached.
Nice landing page but the demo GIF cuts before showing a truly gnarly doc. Show me a coffee-stained handwritten insurance claim from 1997 or I'm not sold.
Curious what your P95 latency looks like on multi-page scans with mixed handwriting. 'Pipeline tuned for accuracy, speed, and cost' is the trilemma every OCR startup claims to solve.
Tagline rewrite, on the house: 'Messy documents in, clean data out.' You're welcome, David.
Before anyone in regulated industries touches this: where does the data sit, who trains on it, and is there a BAA? Would love to see that surfaced above the fold.
Two screenshots and one sentence for a YC launch tweet is bold. Either supreme confidence or you ran out of Canva credits, either way it worked because I clicked.