Vision

We believe that it's possible to achieve success

We believe that it's possible to achieve success
through working

We believe that it's possible to achieve success
through working 
for the sake of others

Who we are

ABBYY's business is to develop and sell AI (Artificial Intelligence) applications, and, in particular, document recognition and natural language processing applications that help people overcome language barriers in a world that is globalizing at an ever increasing pace. 

It was with this aim in mind that we founded ABBYY Software House eleven years ago, and all our strategic decisions have been targeted at achieving this goal ever since. Every product we develop is just another step along the road towards turning computers into intelligent machines that allow users to overcome language barriers.

ôWe believe this goal can only be reached by investing all our thoughts, efforts, and talents into our products. Over the years, by recruiting only the very best scientists from most renowned academic centres and turning them into the best software developers and managers, we have built up a unique team at ABBYY. We have established a smooth process of software development and refined our marketing skills, thus enabling our company to maintain stable growth not only in Russia, but also in Europe and in the whole world. 

Today, ABBYY Software House is definitely on par with any of its competitors. Over the years we have developed a unique corporate culture and powerful quality assurance system.ö

Sergey Andreyev, ABBYY CEO

ABBYY History

ABBYY (called BIT Software before 1997) was founded in 1989 by David Yang (President of ABBYY). Since then ABBYY develops software in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), document recognition and applied linguistics.

The most important dates in ABBYY History:

• 1989 - Foundation of BIT Software
• 1990, July - Launch of Lingvo 1.0, electronic English-Russian-English dictionary
• 1993, July 20 - Birthday of FineReader 1.0 
• 1995, November - Founding of ABBYY Ukraine
• 1997, September - BIT Software announces its new name - ABBYY Software House
• 1997 - World Economic Forum and World Link magazine declared ABBYY one of the 30 most rapidly growing companies of Central and Eastern Europe.
• 1999, February 12 - Foundation of ABBYY USA
• 2000, June 6 - Foundation of ABBYY Europe 
• 2001, July 6 û Foundation of ABBYY UK

ABBYY Group, Personnel

ABBYY Software House (Moscow, Russia) creates the technological strategy of the company, develops the software products, and controls the overall management of the Group, as well as the sales in Russia. ABBYY has representative offices in USA (ABBYY USA, Fremont, CA), Ukraine (ABBYY Ukraine, Kiev) and Europe (ABBYY Europe, Germany, Munich), partners in France, UK, Australia, Italy, Eastern Europe, India, etc. (more than 75 countries). 

Today, the ABBYY Group employs over 200 people, with more than 100 working in Moscow, the Research & Development Department being the largest making up 60% of the Moscow staff. The average age of the ABBYY personnel is 29 years.

The three principal departments of the company are: Research and Development, Marketing, and Corporate Projects and Integration. The R&D Department comprises many sections: Text Recognition Group, Document Layout Analysis and Image Processing Group, User Interface Group, Applied Linguistics Department, Documentation Group and Quality Assurance Group.- and employs graduates of the highly reputed Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Moscow State University (Philological faculty, Department of linguistics).

The development of a science-based software product, such as OCR system, requires a deep scientific research. This research is an integral, fundamental part of development process in ABBYY. The non-confidential results of this research serve as a base for many theses, reports and articles, the authors of which are company's employees.

ABBYY Products

ABBYY's products are: 

• The award-winning OCR ABBYY FineReader 5.0 system for automatic input of texts, tables and forms into computer, 
• An automatic data capture system ABBYY FormReader (OCR/ICR/OMR), which interprets hand print, machine print, check boxes and barcodes from paper forms gathered from fax machines and scanners. 
• FineReader Development Tools that allow developers to integrate OCR capabilities into their own solutions, 
• ABBYY Retrieval & Morphology Engine - an SDK kit for integrating full-text index, retrieval and linguistic technologies into other applications 
• English-Russian-English electronic dictionary Lingvo 6.5 

In 1998 ABBYY's product - Optical Character Recognition system FineReader - became the world quality leader in OCR industry. It is proved by feedback from our customers and results of comparative tests, held worldwide by international IT magazines. ABBYY FineReader 4.0/5.0 products received more than 45 awards from leading IT magazines worldwide (as of July 2001).

ABBYY partners and customers

The quality of technologies in the field of optical recognition of printed and hand-printed characters, linguistic and other technologies of the company are highly esteemed on world market. Since April, 1996, the technologies developed by ABBYY Software House were licensed by the following companies:

Siemens Nixdorf (Germany)

ABBYY won the tender to supply the ARCIS system (a system of archiving, information processing and record maintenance) with automatic information input technology and a set of linguistic subsystems. 

Samsung Electronics (South Korea)

Samsung licensed exclusive rights on FineReaderÆs technology in Korean market. 
NewSoft (USA)

NewSoft's Presto! 

OCR is based on highly reputable FineReader OCR system developed by ABBYY. 

JetFax (USA) 

Arkenstone (USA)

ARKENSTONE uses FineReader technologies in reading systems for people with disabilities. 

Archivista (Switzerland)

FineReader technology was integrated in the Archivista document management applications. 

OTG Software (USA)

OTG SOFTWARE licensed FineReader Engine for imaging technologies to provide automated OCR capability . 

Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. (Japan)

The Japanese concern Sumitomo Electric Industries licensed FineReader 3.0 to build in its own OCR for Japanese and English texts -- OKReader 4.0 

Primax (the Netherlands)

Having tested a great number of different OCR-systems, PRIMAX asked ABBYY to develop the PrimaPage application on the basis of FineReader to be used with Primax scanners. The newly developed Russian-Dutch software will be bundled with all Primax scanners in more than 30 countries all over the world 

C Technologies (Sweden)

C Technologies uses FineReader in its new product - reading pen C-Pen. ABBYY built a special OCR-system on the basis of FineReader Engine on an exclusive basis for C-Technologies. 

GrantSmart

GrantSmart integrates FineReader Engine in its searchable Database of Tax Forms. 

The latest projects integrating ABBYY technologies:

• Automated input of French vehicle titles (carte grise) 
• Automated input of hand-printed Income Tax Return form at the Russian Tax Service 
• Automated input of hand-printed "Insurance Questionnaire" and "Personal data" forms at the Russian Federation State Pension Fund 
• Automatic text collection system of PR Net 
• more...

ABBYY has 5 global-wide OEM-agreements with scanner manufacturers to supply special version of ABBYY FineReader OCR with their devices.

• November, 2000 - contract with Microtek Lab, Redondo, California (USA)
• November, 2000 - contract with Mustek Systems Inc. (Taiwan)
• November, 2000 - contract with UMAX Data Systems Inc. (Taiwan)
• January, 2000 - contract with Avigramm Technology Corporation (Taiwan)
• November, 1999 - contract with Acer Peripherals, Inc. (Taiwan)

ABBYY actively promotes its products on local and international markets. ABBYY is an open company - we are always ready to cooperate with press. If you are representing mass media, please write your requests to Nastasya Savina (nastasya@abbyy.com). 

Since 1997 ABBYY participates in CeBIT (Hanover), since 1999 - in COMDEX Fall (Las Vegas). ABBYY participates in numerous regional exhibitions and conferences and organizes DOCFLOW conference on document management in Russia.