Reverie to add more languages

To bridge the language divide in the digital world- three people —Arvind Pani, Vivekananda Pani and S K Mohanty — founded Reverie Language Technologies in 2009.

This Bengaluru-based company works with OEM and chipset manufacturers across millions of devices, the consumer Internet space (online retail, ecommerce marketplaces, travel, media and entertainment), banks and financial services, e-governance, and the developer community. Its platform provides localisation services such as local-language translation, transliteration, device input, and search through a set of APIs.

“We started with an aim to enlarge the business vision of organisations beyond the realms of India’s 10% English users,” says Co-founder of Reverie Language Technologies Vivekananda Pani.

With a team size of 65 people, spread across Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Reverie focuses on different aspects of language localisation to provide an end-to-end language experience for local language users in the country.

It raised $4 million in Series A funding from Aspada and Qualcomm Ventures, in 2015. As of now, the company is not looking to raise any funding, and it’s concentrating in R&D and growing its customer base. Its language solutions enable websites and mobile apps to localise their content smartly.

“Over the last one year or so, we have seen that lot of businesses are keen to take the language leap. In the next two to three months, we will see some really good projects whose localisation is powered by Reverie that will impact a lot of Indian language users positively,” Pani says.

When asked about challenges, he adds, “The challenges are deep rooted on how people communicating in languages are perceived in our country. And the lack of any or continued digital education to local language users on how they can join the digital bandwagon in their own language.”

Reverie’s clients are — Internet Businesses such as Practo, Hungama, MapMyIndia, Datamail, Ixigo, Ola, Abhibus; BFSI Sector (BHIM app), Multilingual Governance (state governments of Karnataka and Rajasthan); OEMs (Intex, Karbonn Mobile, Zen Mobile, Ziox Mobile, Qualcomm, Micromax); and it also engages with app developers through its Language as a Service (LaaS) platform.

When asked about competitors, Pani says, “There are many companies complimentary to us, and they are focusing on a nice segment of the localisation. We are the only company focusing on an end-to-end language experience. Besides, we are the only Indian company building machine translation for Indian languages.”

He adds, “Also, we are the only company in the country providing business to business (B2B) related Indic language solutions with a 360-degree approach to end consumer language experience.”

When asked about monetisation, he says, “Depending on the language solution, we charge licence fees or per model fees for our device-based solutions. We apply usage fees or provide tiered pricing for our LaaS platform for enterprise and small businesses. We are planning to add more languages on the machine translation side and will be adding voice-based language capabilities as well.”