exb: IDP Software Vendor

Munich-based AI company pivoted from general document processing to logistics automation and financial crime prevention, achieving over 70% straight-through processing on day one of deployment.

Overview

ExB Labs, founded in 2000, completed a strategic transformation in 2024 and 2025, shifting from general document processing to vertical specialization in logistics and compliance. The company's core bet: dominating two specific niches beats competing horizontally against enterprise IDP vendors with far greater resources.

In October 2024, founder Dr. Ramin Assadollahi stepped down as CEO, replaced by Tobias Brix, a scaling specialist with a data and AI automation background. The leadership change signaled a deliberate shift from product development to market expansion. ExB raised €9.5 million in funding led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Bayern Kapital, Plug and Play Tech Center, Hannover Digital Investments, and Blackrun Partners.

The company's September 2025 launch of Anna, its template-free logistics document automation product, is the clearest expression of this strategy. Anna achieves over 70% dark processing (fully automated, zero human touch) on day one, rising above 95% after initial deployment, according to ExB's product announcement. That performance metric matters because most IDP platforms require weeks of template configuration before reaching comparable automation rates.

How Anna handles logistics documents

Anna is ExB's primary product as of 2025. It processes waybills, delivery notes, commercial invoices, packing lists, customs documents, dangerous goods documents, and bills of lading without pre-configured templates or customer-specific training. The zero-shot extraction approach means logistics operators can deploy without the configuration overhead that characterizes most enterprise IDP platforms.

The product's cross-document validation capability addresses one of the most costly problems in freight operations: discrepancies between invoices, delivery notes, and customs documents that create delays and compliance risk. Anna checks quantities, amounts, and addresses across related documents before delivering structured output to downstream systems. When data is unclear or inconsistent, the product flags the exception and routes it for human review, rather than passing bad data silently downstream.

As Holger Trittenbach, Head of Product and Machine Learning at ExB, stated in September 2025: "Our customers don't need more software, they need results. That's exactly what Anna delivers: she reduces manual work, speeds up processes, and ensures verified, structured data — immediately and measurably."

Anna integrates via API to ERP, TMS, and DMS systems including SAP, CargoWise, ELO, and DATEV, with GDPR compliance built in. The integration list targets mid-market logistics operators and freight forwarders in German-speaking markets, where these systems dominate. Trittenbach presented Anna at LogiMAT 2026 in Stuttgart in March 2026, positioning the product as an autonomous colleague rather than a configuration-heavy tool.

Financial crime prevention

ExB's second vertical targets virtual asset money laundering risks. In November 2025, the company secured UK government backing for anti-money laundering initiatives covering Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the South Caucasus. The compliance platform analyzes financial documents and transaction patterns to identify suspicious activities and support regulatory policy development.

This vertical sits at the opposite end of the document processing spectrum from logistics: where Anna handles high-volume, structured freight documents, the compliance work involves lower-volume, high-stakes financial document analysis with direct regulatory consequences.

CBAM regulation compliance

With the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism taking effect in 2026, ExB has developed CO₂-related document processing capabilities for importers requiring carbon content verification and emissions documentation. The CBAM use case extends ExB's compliance positioning beyond financial crime into environmental regulation, targeting European importers facing new documentation requirements.

Technical specifications

Market context

The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Intelligent Document Processing Software 2025-2026 (December 2025) documents the shift ExB is betting on. Andrew Gens, Senior Research Analyst at IDC, stated: "We are firmly in the GenAI era, with the agentic future rapidly approaching, and IDC has seen a significant evolution in the capabilities and strategies offered by IDP software vendors." IDC notes that vendors are extending offerings to capitalize on multimodal generative AI capabilities and moving beyond unstructured document processing toward end-to-end automation workflows and agentic systems.

ExB's positioning of Anna as an autonomous colleague with human oversight reflects this agentic direction. Rather than competing on breadth against horizontal platforms, ExB applies pre-trained logistics domain knowledge to deliver automation rates that horizontal platforms require months of configuration to reach. The tradeoff is narrow applicability: Anna is purpose-built for freight and customs workflows, not general document processing.

Resources

• Website
• Anna product announcement
• Platform overview
• Blog

Company information

Headquarters: Munich, Germany Founded: 2000 CEO: Tobias Brix (since October 2024) Funding: €9.5 million (Alstin Capital, Bayern Kapital, Plug and Play Tech Center, Hannover Digital Investments, Blackrun Partners)