[Funding alert] Devnagri raises $600K in seed round from Venture Catalyst, IPV, others

Devnagri, the Indian language translation engine with a focus on B2B, has raised $600,000 from Venture Catalysts, Inflection Point Ventures, and other co-investors as part of the seed round.

The seed funding round will be utilised 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), and Deepak Sharma (CDO - Kotak Bank).

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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. The platform combines Neural Machine Translation with Machine Learning and a community to power translations. Its AI-human combination is poised to 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.

Devnagri is currently focusing on the edtech 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 ecommerce, BFSI, and publishers who depend on vernacular growth.

Nakul Kundra, Founder of 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 and Tier III cities.”

Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, President and Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, added, 

“The Indian vernacular language and translation market size is worth $53 billion, which currently features edtech, ecommerce, publishing, and OTT Industries. With 100 crore Indians from Tier II and 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. Devnagri is confident in plugging this huge gap using machine translation.”

Currently having 5,000+ translators, Devnagri has a growing community aiming for scalability, savings, and satisfaction of its catering businesses.

Mitesh Shah, Co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures shared, 

“Indian languages are missing from the internet. In the last 10 years, many websites have started providing multilingual 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 contextualised translation.”