Aspada Investment Company, which is backed by billionaire investor George Soros has invested $4 million (Rs 26 crore) in Reverie Language Technologies. Aspada made the investment along with Qualcomm Ventures, the venture capital arm of mobile chipmaker Qualcomm.
The Bengaluru-based startup has built a technology that helps organizations enhance their market reach by delivering applications and content in local languages in real-time. Reverie will use the money to expand its presence in sectors like consumer internet, financial services and government. It will also use the funds to build and grow its sales in geographies such as the Middle East and South East Asia.
According to Arvind Pani, chief executive of Reverie, over 800 million Indians, representing more than 10 per cent of the globe, are literate but don't know English language. Yet their languages form less than 0.02 per cent of all content on the web. "Compare this number with less than 100 million Indian users who transact in English. This is a market waiting to happen, provided it happens in local languages," said Mr. Pani.
Reverie said that it aims to help create a content-rich internet that is accessible to over five billion users of every local language, irrespective of the devices they use. The startup helps to deliver content and transact in over 50 global languages including Latin, Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic based languages.
"We have a deep conviction that Reverie is building the foundational technology of India’s internet," said Sahil Kini, vice president of Aspada.
