San Francisco · 2026

The back office
runs on email
and prayer.
We're changing that.

Route1 AI builds workflow automation for finance and operations teams. We start where the pain is deepest — and we don't stop until the manual work is gone.

See DocFlow, our first product Our thinking
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The problem we're solving

Mid-market companies are operationally invisible.

They're too big for spreadsheets. Too small for SAP. And stuck with a back office that runs on forwarded emails, tribal knowledge, and one person who knows where everything is — until they leave.

01 Documents arrive in inboxes. Nobody built a system. Somebody built a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet became the system.
02 Approvals live in someone's head. When they're on vacation, everything stops. When they leave, nothing is documented.
03 Auditors ask questions nobody can answer. Who approved this? When? Why? The trail is three Slack threads and a deleted email.
04 Smart people spend their days on manual work. Finance managers doing data entry. Controllers chasing invoices. None of this is why they were hired.
What we believe

"Every company should run like it has a world-class operations team — regardless of whether they can afford one."

The Fortune 500 has armies of people, enterprise software, and decades of process. The mid-market has one overloaded Controller, a shared inbox, and a prayer. That's not a resource problem — it's a systems problem. And systems can be built.

We're building a suite of tools that automate the operational layer of running a business. Not AI for the sake of it. Not automation theater. Real workflows that replace real manual work — with audit trails, exception handling, and integrations that actually connect to how you already work.

DocFlow is our first product. It handles the document layer: invoices, receipts, purchase orders, contracts. Everything that arrives in your inbox and needs a human to sort it, validate it, route it, and approve it. We automate that — reliably, securely, at scale.

First product

Meet DocFlow.

Intelligent document workflow from intake to approval. No manual entry. No lost invoices. No approval bottlenecks. Just a clean, auditable process — from the moment a document arrives to the moment it's resolved.

Now building — early access open

DocFlow

Documents come in by email, upload, or API. DocFlow reads every field, validates against your rules, flags duplicates and anomalies, and routes to the right approver — automatically. Your team only touches what actually needs a human decision.

📥
Smart Intake
Email, upload, or API. Any format. Any vendor.
🔍
AI Extraction
Every field pulled with confidence scores. No manual entry.
⚡
Auto-Routing
Rule-based routing to the right approver instantly.
🛡️
Validation Engine
3-way match, dupe detection, anomaly flagging.
✅
Approval Chains
One-click approve with full context and SLA tracking.
📋
Audit Trail
Every action logged. Every decision explainable.
Join the DocFlow waitlist
How we build
I
Backend first.
Strong infrastructure before beautiful UI. If the data model is wrong, no amount of design saves you. We get the engine right, then we make it fast and smooth.
II
No automation theater.
We only automate what we can automate reliably. Partial automation with unclear handoffs is worse than none. Every flow has a clear human escalation path.
III
Ship, learn, repeat.
We move fast but we don't move reckless. Each phase has a clear gate. We don't move to the next thing until the current thing works. No half-built features in production.
M
Manish Gudimetla
Founder, Route1 AI
UC Berkeley Seismology Lab
"I've watched finance teams waste entire days on work that should have taken minutes. The tools existed to fix it. Nobody built them for the right people — so we are."

Route1 AI is based in San Francisco. We're early, we're moving fast, and we're building in public. DocFlow is the first product. The back office problem is bigger than any one tool — we're building the suite to solve it.

If your team processes
documents manually —
this is for you.

DocFlow is in early access. We're onboarding a small group of finance teams to shape the product.

Join the DocFlow waitlist → No spam. No demos. Just an invite when we're ready.