This techie helps businesses speak to Indians in their own languages

Arvind Pani's firm is the first in the world to launch an Indian language support on Android platform in 2011 in partnership with Qualcomm

Almost every consumer-facing internet company is now going overboard on acquiring capability to engage with its users and customers in vernacular languages. This, in fact, is something this former Intel engineer had visualised more than a decade ago when he started his own entrepreneurial journey, quitting a cushy job at global chip maker Intel in 2006. It was no surprise when Reliance decided to acquire majority stake in Reverie Language Technologies which was co-founded by Arvind Pani.   

“I always wanted to solve real world problems that touch the masses,” says Pani, who had worked with Intel within the company’s enterprise software team for seven years before starting Reverie. “A start-up is not just about coming up with an idea on paper and sounding like a cool entrepreneur. It has to be something unique while putting enough skin in the game.” 

In fact, Pani’s first venture was Reverie Technology, a start-up that focused on mobile payments and commerce, which he founded along with brother Vivekananda and few others. However, he believes the idea behind that start-up probably was ahead of time because of which it was closed down within three years.

By then, Pani had already exhausted his savings in the start-up but saw an opportunity in the local language space as mobile phones were starting to enter the market in a strong way and were not a niche product anymore. However, they did not have the capability to display SMSes in Indian languages. He realised that if a mobile phone has to be used by the masses in India it cannot only be having English-language display. So Pani along with his brother and friend S K Mohanty from the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) started building the fundamentals of language support, fonts, display technology for mobile phones in local languages and thus was born Reverie Language Technologies, an Indian language localisation service platform in 2009. It became the first company in the world to launch an Indian language support on Android platform in 2011 in partnership with Qualcomm.

Today, it is a full-stack Indian-language product and technology company which has several tools to create content, conversion of speech to text and text to speech which enable businesses to engage with their customers in local languages. It has recently come up with two more products -- Anuvadak and Prabandhak.  

Anuvadak helps publishing websites in any official Indian language while bringing down the website localisation time by 40 per cent and can save as much as 60 per cent of the localisation and content management costs. Anuvadak in fact is powering the mygov.in Covid-19 website with support in 10 Indian languages. Prabandhak is a marketplace where people who want translations in multiple languages can avail the service through translators. It is a cloud-based and AI-powered translation management hub that ensures swift, easy, and accurate localisation. 

Pani’s venture today touches over 250 million end users through language technology with several topnotch clients such as Ola, HDFC, and Practo among others. But his journey to this was full of toil as he had to bootstrap the company for six years before raising the first round of funding. “Having an idea and raising a fund is not our idea of a startup,” says Pani. 

The turning point came in 2019 when Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio acquired an 83.3 per cent stake in the Bengaluru-based start-up for Rs 190 crore. Pani grabbed the strategic alliance opportunity with the telecom behemoth which was already licencing Reverie’s technology for Jio devices for the past three years. 

The company which has a strong backing from Reliance aims to touch every aspect of user engagement in local languages. While India is the second largest internet user in the world after China, content produced in Indian languages are less than 0.1 per cent on those available on the internet.