A homegrown startup, Devnagri, specializing in B2B Indian language translation, just managed to bag some fresh funding. This round was led by Inflection Point Ventures, and although the exact amount remains undisclosed, one thing is clear: Devnagri is stepping up its game.
PC: Entrepreneur
Now, let’s get into what truly makes Devnagri special. Co-Founded by Nakul Kundra and Himanshu Sharma, this startup is all about making business communication accessible to the lot that doesn’t understand English. Just imagine wading through business documents or official communications in a language you are not fluent with, Devnagri comes in to fill that gap.
They offer personalized and contextualized content, which implies that these are not only correct translations but also culturally relevant. This is quite something for a country like India, where more than 700 languages are spoken!
What are they going to do with their new funding? According to the company, this new money will be channeled into some key areas: marketing, sales, technology scaling, research and development (R&D), infrastructure, and administrative expenses. Basically, scaling in a big way. He said they are moving to offering private cloud infrastructure for enterprises and government departments. This would give full control over the content to these institutions, while they could get the benefit of Devnagri’s NLP and SLM, which get smarter with every use.
Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder of Inflection Point Ventures, has said that challenges associated with the translation of languages in India are not merely a word-to-word transformation from one language to another. Rather, it embodies the culture in context. Devnagri’s AI-powered human translation faces head-on such challenges and becomes very hand-on tools for businesses and government bodies alike.
The market opportunity for Devnagri is huge at a valuation of $53 billion in India alone, growing at 6.7% CAGR. Of course, this isn’t their first rodeo when it comes to funding. In 2021, the firm had secured $600,000 in a seed round from Venture Catalyst, Inflection Point Ventures, and its co-investors.
Also, Inflection Point Ventures has invested more than Rs 720 crore across more than 200 startups.
Basically, Devnagri is on a quest to make business communication more inclusive and effective for non-English speakers in the country. With this new round of funding, they are all set to increase operations and technology, which simply means they are going to emerge as one of the startups one needs to watch during the upcoming years. Keep watching Devnagri; they really mean something in this emerging arena of generative AI and language translation!
