Every insurance form or bank check that went into a high-speed scanner in the 1990s had to come out as a clean, readable image. Kofax made that happen. The Irvine, California company sold image processing boards and software that sat between scanners and computers, cleaning up and compressing each page as it flew past. Its founders came from FileNet, an early document imaging company. Kofax went public in October 1997.

Two Engineers From FileNet

David Silver and Dean Hough had worked together at FileNet before they started Kofax in 1985. Silver had helped develop the FileNet imaging system, and he became Kofax's chief executive. As scanners got faster, the computers behind them struggled to keep up. Kofax built accelerator boards that did the heavy lifting, plus scanner enhancement products that straightened and cleaned images. It sold through value-added resellers, system integrators and equipment makers who built document imaging systems.

Small Listing, Long Afterlife

Kofax priced its IPO at $11 a share in October 1997 and listed on Nasdaq as KOFX. It was a small company, with fiscal 1997 sales of about $29.3 million. In July 1999 Dicom Group, a British imaging company, agreed to buy it for about $75 million in cash. Dicom later took the Kofax name for itself. The business moved its headquarters to Denver and now operates as Tungsten Automation.

Cover: The Scribe, Salomon de Koninck. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a scribe copying a page (document capture).