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Bangalore-based startup that has cloud-based Language-as-a-Service platform, Reverie Technologies, has raised $4 Mn in Series A funding led by Aspada Investment Company. Its existing investor Qualcomm Ventures also participated in this round of funding.
The funds raised will be used to grow company’s language-as-a-service platform, consolidate market share, create fully automated solutions and expand globally.
According to Arvind Pani, Co-founder and CEO of Reverie Language Technologies, “India is at an inflection point where businesses are realizing the importance of local languages. We want to be established as the de facto standard of everything that’s said and done in Indian languages on the web. Reverie aims to create content-rich Internet that is accessible to over 5 billion users of every local language, irrespective of the devices they use.”
The company hopes to engage with over 10,000 developers in next one and half years to produce native language content.
Arvind Pani along with his two other co-founders, Vivekananda Pani and S. K. Mohanty, started Reverie Language Technologies in 2010.
According to Arvind’s excerpts a year back, there are over 6.5 Bn mobile users and around 50 popular languages worldwide, only a billion prefer English as their first language. Yet, 57% of internet content is in english.
Today, as for India, english literacy is just more than 10%, that is over 800 Mn mobile users are literate in their languages and not in english.
Hence, an estimated 3.5 Bn mobile users worldwide are digitally excluded due to unavailability of content in local language or due to unsatisfactory user experience.
This humongous market demand led to Reverie Language Technologies.
Reverie’s cloud-based language-as-a-service-platform helps translate, transliterate, input and search on web in many Indian languages. These regional language are fed into many manufactured devices like mobile, tablets, set top boxes, games and application developers among others.
According to a recent report by the Internet and Media Association of India and IMRB International, creating local language content on the Internet would grow the Indian online user base by 39%, mostly from rural segments.
Sahil Kini, vice president of Aspada said, “Over 200 Mn people in India are right now excluded from the digital economy because of language barrier. Reverie has built tech to eliminate this barrier with very little effort from the developers’ side, essentially defining a whole new computing. It has the potential to become foundational technology for the Indian and non-English internet.”
Reverie Technologies were also part of the coveted Tech 30 from TechSparks 2011. The company has also been awarded by Qualcomm through the QPrize competition in 2011 for its innovative idea.
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