Language translation engine Devnagri raises $600,000 in seed round

The platform combines Neural Machine Translation with ML to make the internet accessible to 90% of Indians and solve the problem of "lack of content in Indian languages"

B2B-focused Indian language translation engine Devnagri, has raised $600,000 from Venture Catalyst, Inflection Point Ventures and other co-investors in a seed round.

Other participants 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 Mahindra Bank).

A brainchild of Nakul Kundra and Himanshu Sharma, Devnagri was established with a vision to make the internet accessible to 90 per cent 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 company claimed that AI-human combination can help businesses scale their operations anytime, in any language with up to 50 per cent reduced cost, real-time delivery tracking with 80% reduction in translation time and 5x faster than professional translation.

Nakul Kundra, Founder of Devnagri said, “There is a strong need for content in Indian languages to be available over the internet, which helps 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-2 & Tier-3 cities.”

Sharing his insights, Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, President and Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “The Indian vernacular language and translation market size is worth $53 billion, and currently features edTech, e-commerce, publishing and OTT Industries. With a billion Indians from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities expected to join the internet (due to affordable smartphones and data), content availability in Indian languages is only 0.1 per cent and less than 10 per cent of Indians are conversant in English.”

Mitesh Shah, co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures, says, “Indian languages are missing from the Internet. In the past 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.”

Currently having 5,000-plus translators, Devnagri has an extensive and incessantly growing community aiming for scalability, savings, and satisfaction of its catering businesses.