Startup Idea: eDiscovery Document Imaging Enhancement with FPGA API

Startup idea to facilitate eDiscovery in litigation by developing an API that leverages FPGAs to speed up document imaging. The solution aims to filter out irrelevant files, catalogue evidential documents in an SQL database, and create images of the documents faster than existing x86 Windows platform-based software.

I work in electronic discovery (eDiscovery) which collects documents relevant to civil litigation.

A large part of the work involves sifting through all the files collected from systems which are known to be irrelevant to the case (Windows System Files, common applications, etc). The remaining documents are then cataloged with evidence numbers in an SQL database, and images are produced from the documents (to serve as working copies for courts that cannot be easily edited).

Presently, this imaging process is very slow. All of the leading software products that do Batch Imaging (potentially millions of pages) run on an x86 Windows platform. This process could be drastically sped up if there was an API for using FPGAs for imaging documents.