Devnagri, an Indian Language Translation Engine with focus on B2B, has raised $600,000 from Venture Catalyst, Inflection Point Ventures and other co-investors as part of Seed Round.
The seed funding round will be utilized to strengthen its technology and scale its operations to help B2B sectors create more vernacular language content for end-users.
Co-investors that participated in the funding include Mitesh Shah (IPV-First Port Capital), Rohit Chanana (Sarcha Advisors), Nimesh Kampani (Trica), Sameer Karulkar (Coverpage Ventures Advisory LLP), Prashant Sharma (Facebook, Country Lead - Video), Karan Bhagi (HUL, GM - eCommerce) & Deepak Sharma (CDO - Kotak Bank).
A brainchild of Nakul Kundra and Himanshu Sharma, Devnagri was established with a vision to make the internet accessible to 90 percent of Indians and solve the problem of “lack of content in Indian Languages” using tech.
How it works
The platform combines Neural Machine Translation with machine learning and a community to power translations. Its AI-human combination can help businesses scale their operations anytime, in any language with up to 50 percent reduced cost, real-time delivery tracking with 80 percent reduction in translation time and 5x faster than professional translation, according to a press release.
Devnagri is organizing the way the translation industry works and enables faster, on time translation by using the AI powered workflow to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the translation process.
A bootstrapped company to date, Devnagri is currently focusing on the ed-tech industry, solving various use cases. With the latest infusion of funds, the company intends to increase its accuracy in Machine Translation and scale its operations to target businesses in sectors like E-commerce, BFSI and publishers who depend on vernacular growth.
Nakul Kundra, Founder, Devnagri said, “There is a strong need for content in Indian Languages to be available over the internet, which helps the Indians to use technology (be it Entertainment, News, Education, Movies, etc.) in their respective language. With our current round of funding, we intend to scale our operations to tap B2B customers and enable them to create more local (Indian Language) content to reach end-users from Tier II & Tier III cities.”
Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, President and Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “The Indian vernacular language and translation market size is worth $53 billion, which currently features Ed-Tech, E-Commerce, Publishing and OTT Industries. With 100 crore Indians from Tier II & Tier III cities expected to join the Internet (Because of affordable smartphones and data), the content availability in Indian languages is only 0.1 percent and less than 10 percent of Indians are conversant in English.”
Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, Inflection Point Ventures said, “Indian languages are missing from the internet. In the last 10 years, many websites have started provided multi-lingual options for the non-English users but it is still not enough. Devnagri has developed a model, which can scale the efforts to put Indian languages on the Internet map. Their application of ML and Neural machine translation will help companies used contextualized translation. We believe this would be a gamer changer in Indic languages on the internet with relevant used cases.”
“Today, India has a digital ecosystem that includes close to a billion people and is being created at a scale unparalleled anywhere else in the world. We are in need to reach the last mile / last consumer of the internet in their language so that they can harness its power,” added Co-Founder Himanshu Sharma.
Currently having 5000+ translators, Devnagri has an extensive and incessantly growing community aiming for scalability, savings, and satisfaction of its catering businesses, it said.
