{"id":93012,"title":"Cardinal: The Most Accurate Document Intelligence API","tagline":"Cardinal turns unstructured, messy documents into perfectly structured data, instantly and with unmatched accuracy.","body":"**Hey everyone – Devi and Jianna here** 👋🏼\n\nWe met while studying at MIT and Harvard, and our last company processed utility data at scale. The biggest bottleneck? OCR. It was terrible - especially for complex documents where preserving structure was critical. After years of wrestling with these OCR limitations, we decided to build something better. That became Cardinal.\n\n📃 **The Problem**\n\n Most enterprise knowledge is trapped in PDFs and other unstructured formats -  medical forms, contracts, invoices, insurance claims, financial statements, packing slips, etc. \n\nOCR is _not_ a solved problem:\n\n* LLMs hallucinate and can fabricate data\n* Annotations, checkmarks, and handwritten notes get ignored\n* Tables, charts, and images are dropped entirely\n* Layouts are mangled, breaking document structure and making the output unusable for code, retrieval, or downstream automation. Preserving the semantic meaning of the document is nearly impossible.\n\n\\\n🚀 **Our Solution**\n\nCardinal has 2 finetuned models. The first model, _Document-to-Markdown_, accurately converts even complex documents into clean, structured Markdown. The second model, _Markdown-to-Code_, then turns that Markdown into ready-to-use HTML, preserving the original formatting and hierarchy exactly.\n\nPut simply, we can help you:\n\n* Reliably extract structured data from the most complex PDFs\n* Preserve exact layouts for retrieval, search, and downstream LLM workflows\n* Convert charts into data, summarize images, and parse complex tables\n* Run natural language extractions for any field without brittle regex or templates\n\nFull Demo video: [https://youtu.be/RouYM1cKGXI](https://youtu.be/RouYM1cKGXI?feature=shared)\n\n🔗 **Demo** \\\nTry it [here](https://dashboard.trycardinal.ai/) - we’d love your feedback!\n\n🙏🏼 **Our Ask**\n\n**If you or your team works in enterprise and deals with complex document workflows, we’d love to chat.**\n\n**📅 Here’s our [Calendly](https://calendly.com/leafpress/demo-chat): Book time here or email us at [team@trycardinal.ai](mailto:team@trycardinal.ai).**","slug":"OCC-cardinal-the-most-accurate-document-intelligence-api","created_at":"2025-08-18T15:00:27.914Z","updated_at":"2026-05-05T21:09:18.382Z","total_vote_count":14,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OCC-cardinal-the-most-accurate-document-intelligence-api","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=93012\u0026key=user_uploads/1244892/41effcb8-0653-4859-86f1-3f2838ad5f0a","company":{"id":28743,"name":"Leafpress","slug":"leafpress","url":"https://www.trycardinal.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/8b397defdcecf4c281122216507cb5239f88b392.png","batch":"Summer 2023","industry":"B2B","tags":["Enterprise","Enterprise Software","Infrastructure"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/28743"}}