In the process of starting their mobile dating app startup, Josh Israel and Devin Serago were stunned by the amount of paper they had to print out and sign.
They thought of themselves as young, forward-thinking entrepreneurs, so it seemed ridiculous that they would still be printing out so much paper in 2016.
“A trillion sheets of paper are still printed worldwide every single year in offices, so to us it seemed and still is a massive problem that no one has attacked directly,” Israel said. “We set our minds on figuring out if there was a way to drive environmental sustainability through paper reduction,” Israel said.
Out of this forward thinking, the entrepreneurs’ next startup, Pāpr, was born.
Pāpr is a software that eliminates the need to print out paper by sending documents to a tablet. The tablet, provided by Pāpr, allows users to insert an electronic signature and send the signed document back to other users who have a Pāpr tablet. There is no need to print out documents, sign them and scan them onto a computer.
"We set our minds on figuring out if there was a way to drive environmental sustainability through paper reduction."
Using Pāpr is just as simple as using a printer. This is because Israel and Serago rewrote the operating system of a tablet to make computers think the device is a printer. Clicking the "print" button, therefore, sends documents to a Pāpr tablet.
Dashboards in the Papr application tell customers how many sheets of paper and trees they have saved using the system. For every tree that Pāpr saves (or, 8,333 sheets of paper), the company plants a tree.
Pāpr can also check off one accomplishment that not many entrepreneurs have achieved: recognition from the Pope. It's one of the startups funded by the Vatican’s Laudato Si’ Startup Challenge, which funds and incubates startups that are solving humanity’s biggest problems.
Currently, Pāpr is focused on serving small- to medium-sized businesses. Their current customers include a dozen SMBs, from schools to fitness centers, and Israel said Pāpr is looking at different industries to see how they can adapt their software to serve the specific needs of those organizations, oftentimes by streamlining workflow.
“When people come to us from inbound inquiries, we don’t say, ‘Here’s our software! Try it out’,” Israel said. “We ask, ‘What is your workflow? Where are you seeing the most amount of paper that you’re using? What is your paper problem?’ and see if we can adapt our software to fit that need, and if that need can be driven further along in their industry, or if it is just a problem for their specific business.”
Solving problems for customers is something that Israel and Sergao are not strangers to, having launched a social network after meeting at Monmouth University in New Jersey. After deciding to go in a different direction, they brought the rebranded "Thrill" to India, where they later sold their company.
Not long after, they began their work with Pāpr, which brought them to both Cincinnati and tech accelerator UpTech's fifth cohort. It was a perfect fit for the founders, as they saw the Queen City as a growing startup hub with a low cost of living — one that proved to be ideal for building a startup in its earliest stages.
After graduating from UpTech, Pāpr moved to New York City, as both founders are originally from the East Coast and their lead investor is a New York-based fund. While the company has a sweet spot working with the aforementioned SMBs, Israel said Papr plans to look into larger enterprise businesses in the future as potential customers.
For now, however, they don’t plan to spend any money on advertising because their growth has been organic thus far — paper reduction and environmental sustainability drive customers to Pāpr.
