NLP and data science could be so easy if all of our data came as clean and plain text. But in practice, a lot of it is hidden away in PDFs, Word documents, scans and other formats that have been a nightmare to work with. In this talk, I'll present a new and modular approach for building robust document understanding systems, using state-of-the-art models and the awesome Python ecosystem. I'll show you how you can go from PDFs to structured data and even build fully custom information extraction pipelines for your specific use case.