The former Bain & Company consultant has raised $1.5 million for an AI startup that solves one of the headaches they face every day.
Singapore's startup Blueente is betting that experts will pay a faster way to translate documents without losing formats.
The tool works between documents from contracts to slide decks, providing translations in over 120 languages, keeping all tables, charts, images and layouts intact.
Founder Daphne Tay said he came up with the idea after spending “countless hours” on Bain Reforatting translated documents.
“I was doing exactly what my client was doing now. I was copying and pasting text from the translation tool, revising the format and losing time that was supposed to be spent on actual consulting work,” she said.
Tay launched Blueente in 2021. The company's first product is a business-centric language learning app, Duolingo in legal and financial terms. When that didn't work, she pivoted to document the translation, Tay told Business Insider.
Blueente raised $1.5 million in the Seed Plus round, led by an informed venture based on Menlo Park. No other investors were involved and Tay refused to share the company's ratings.
Unlike most founders who pitch dozens of VCs, Blueente's process was short. The informed venture approached the company directly.
“They actually faced the same problems,” Tay said, adding that the company's partners worked as bankers handling multilingual transactions.
Tay told Business Insider that new funds will be directed towards expanding into markets in the Middle East, Asia Pacific and the US, as well as new recruits to expand the company's six-person team.
The company will first hire sales representatives and then hire product and engineering roles.
Some of the funding will be directed towards pushing past translations, along with plans to develop sophisticated document processing infrastructure, Tay said.
In a press release Thursday, the company said it has more than 70 companies' customers, including law firms, financial institutions, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.
Blueente's biggest rival is Deepl, with German translation startups at $1 billion, Tay said, adding that Blueente distinguishes itself by focusing on the document processing layer.
As Microsoft Research flags translators as one of the most likely jobs to be destroyed by AI, Blueente places itself as an infrastructure for global document workflows, not just another translation app.
Check out the Blueente pitch deck, which was used to secure fresh funds.
