Japan’s Manabie raises $12M in series A round to build “ERP for schools” – BRIDGE

Singapore-based AI Communis, the startup behind the platform integrating speech recognition and natural language processing technologies, announced on Monday that it has raised $300,000 US in an extended angel round. Participating investors are Tokyo-based VC The Seed, Chinese and Taiwanese multi-channel networks (agents managing influencers), Japanese angel investors who are familiar with YouTube-related businesses in addition to existing investors.

This follows the 1st
close of the company’s angel round back in September of 2021 when they
secured $500,000 US. Keep raising funds, they expect to secure a seed
round by the end of 2022.

AI Communis was founded in April of
2020 by Nobuhiko Suzuki, who has been dealing with the business of
translating, adding subtitles, and editing video clips. These
multilingulization processes, especially needed for global marketing,
had been handled manually for a long time, but the significantly improved
accuracy of automation tools such as Amazon Transcribe, DeepL, Google
Translate has recently made it possible to be mostly automated.

The company launched a web app called Auris last year, which allows users to handle a series of tasks such as translation, subtitling, and video editing in a cloud environment. Leveraging the app, the company plans to launch a new business where crowdsourced gig workers help influencers and company marketers turn their video clips into any of 10 Asian languages.

Such video multilingualization is in great demand
among YouTubers and companies who want to expand themselves and their
products globally. The service is not yet fully operational and the
demand is greater than the company originally expected, but it will take
only about a week to deliver an output with adding translated subtitles
after receiving the material source.

AI Communis has a wide
range of delivery formats. Some YouTubers have asked the company to not
only turn their clips into foreign languages, but also to manage different language channels under their YouTube account and to make efforts to increase viewership. The
company raised investments from MCN and YouTuber businesses in the latest round to
learn from them more about how to increase viewer engagement on social media.

The Auris platform
currently supports 10 languages: English, Chinese (Mandarin), Korean,
Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Indonesian, Hindu, and Malay. This
means that in terms of population alone, Auris can streamline the
development of content that can help YouTubers and marketers reach more
than one-third of the world’s total population.

The platform had about 100
users in November, two months after the beta launch, but since then it
has rapidly grown to 1,000 users in January 2022, 3,000 users in March,
8,000 users by the end of March, and now about 10,000 users. Perhaps
it’s because of the demand from influencers, KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders),
or even attracted potential gig workers using the tool.

AI
Communis is based at BLOCK 71, a Singaporean startup hub where NUS
(National University of Singapore), Singtel, and other organizations are
running their accelerators respectively. The location attracts
prospective entrepreneurs and interns from all over Southeast Asia,
which is conducive to startups developing multilingual services. They
will also perhaps contribute greatly to the development of AI Communis’
business.