Indian language startup Devnagri raises $600K in funding from Venture Catalyst, IPV, others

B2B SaaS-based translation platform Devnagri today announced it has raised $600,000 in a seed funding round led by Venture Catalyst and Inflection Point Ventures.

The funding round also saw participation from 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).

According to a statement, Devnagri will utilize the raised funding to strengthen its technology and scale its operations to help B2B sectors create more vernacular language content for end-users. 

Founded by 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.

The startup in a statement said that 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.

The platform 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.

It 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 E-commerce, BFSI, and publishers who depend on vernacular growth, it 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," Nakul Kundra, Founder of Devnagri said.

"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," he adds.

Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, President & Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “The Indian vernacular language & translation market size is worth $53Billion, which currently features Ed-Tech, E-Commerce, Publishing & 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 the leading startups in the NLP Industry of India, 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," she adds.

Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, Inflection Point Ventures shares, “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 adds.

Also Read:

• Inflection Point Ventures leads seed round in Bengaluru-based Playto Labs

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