Indian Language Translation Platform Devnagri Raises $600K In Seed Round

B2B SaaS-based translation platform, Devnagri recently raised $600,000 from Venture Catalyst, Inflection Point Ventures and other co-investors as part of the seed round. The latest investment will help businesses reach 1+ billion Indian internet users in their regional languages using AI-powered human translation at scale. 

Led by Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, 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% of Indians and solve the problem of "lack of content in Indian Languages" using tech. 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% reduced cost, real-time delivery tracking with 80% reduction in translation time, and 5x faster than professional translation. 

"There is a strong need for content in Indian Languages to be available over the internet, which helps the Indians 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," said Kundra.

Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, President and Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, "The Indian vernacular language & translation market size is worth $53Billion, which currently features Ed-Tech, E-Commerce, Publishing and OTT Industries. With 100 Cr Indians from Tier II & Tier III cities expected to join the internet (because of affordable smartphones & data), the content availability in Indian languages is only 0.1%, and less than 10% of Indians are conversant in English. Devnagri is confident in plugging this huge gap using machine translation. As one of India's leading startups in the NLP industry, the company is aligned with Digital India and Atma Nirbhar Bharat's vision to enable the Internet in Indian languages. They are showing immense exponential growth, and we wish them success in their journey."

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. A bootstrapped company to date, Devnagri is currently focusing on the ed-tech industry, solving various use cases.