Proofcheck

Proofcheck is a Vienna-based company established in 2022 that has developed an AI-powered software platform to centralize and streamline content workflows. The firm was co-founded by the American husband-and-wife team of Tara Więckowska-Merrigan, who serves as CEO, and Alexandre Paris, the CTO. Więckowska-Merrigan's background in book, magazine, and academic publishing, including a tenure at Condé Nast, directly informed the product's development, which she envisioned as a tool she wished she had during her career. Paris contributes expertise in software development and data science.

The company's core business revolves around providing a solution for creators to prepare and perfect high-stakes content such as books, white papers, and corporate reports. Its clientele primarily consists of enterprise content creators, with an early focus on book publishers in North America and Europe, including some of the largest in Germany and the United States. Revenue is generated through a subscription-based model, offering plans with recurring periodic billing.

Proofcheck's platform is distinguished by its visually aware, "pixel-perfect" AI proofing capabilities for designed PDFs and ePubs, formats previously underserved by automated tools. The technology utilizes an ensemble of custom-trained open-source models and proprietary algorithms, rather than general-purpose LLMs, to deliver high-fidelity results while ensuring customer intellectual property remains secure. Its proprietary AI document parser can quickly identify different elements within a designed document, like body text, titles, and footnotes. Key features include multilingual typo detection, checking for inconsistent margin padding (spread balance), and automatically surfacing widows and orphans. By automating tedious tasks, the platform aims to provide significant efficiency gains and time savings for its users.

The startup secured an initial "day zero" investment from Plug and Play and has since raised a total of approximately $542K (€500K) in a pre-seed funding round. This round was led by BackBone Ventures and included participation from Angel Invest, business angel Gernot Singer, and technologist Kyle Kosic, an early engineer at OpenAI. This capital is being used to accelerate platform development and expand its functionality to cover the entire corporate content creation lifecycle. Keywords: AI proofreading, content workflow automation, publishing technology, enterprise content creation, PDF proofing, ePub checking, editorial software, automated editing, design-aware AI, content quality assurance, corporate reporting tools, book publishing software, document analysis, natural language processing, visual mistake detection, spread balance check, widow and orphan detection, content production, editorial workflow, Tara Więckowska-Merrigan, Alexandre Paris