We’re excited to announce that Leo has won an Emergent Ventures grant worth $50,000 to support the growth of the platform in the coming months.

Leo is an all-in-one transcription and document management platform designed for professional historians, archivists, and researchers working with handwritten manuscripts and printed text in Latin scripts from the later medieval period to the present. It uses cutting-edge AI to transform images of historical documents into plain text that’s accessible, searchable, and ready for advanced analysis. It also provides an intuitive platform to store, organize, edit, and search documents, with file structure management, advanced search, and metadata filtering capabilities.

Emergent Ventures is a fellowship and grant program administered by the economist and talent scout Tyler Cowen at the Mercatus Center. It “supports entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, ‘zero to one’ ideas for meaningfully improving society.” The program backs focused, high-upside projects around the world, favoring speed, scrappiness, and ambitious outcomes.

We’ll use the grant to:

• Expand training data across scripts, languages, and periods
• Train our model for more epochs to improve accuracy and robustness
• Introduce semantic search using vector embeddings
• Add interpretation features, allowing users to translate, summarize, and interpret transcripts
• Allow users to fine-tune our model on corrected transcripts
• Improve onboarding and documentation to make the platform easier to use
• Fix bugs and smaller issues on the web-app

We’ll also invest in marketing, including paid advertising, community seeding, and a brand relaunch that leverages our lion mascot as a bumbling yet enthusiastic palaeographer for reach on social media.

To date, we have fully bootstrapped the venture, investing personal capital to hire developers and cover computing costs. With the help of this generous grant, we’ll be able to continue to develop Leo into a self-sustaining business, without losing the speed and operational agility that got us here. Thank you to Emergent Ventures for their support!