Viva Translate, a Palo Alto, CA-based cross-language translation tool provider, raised $4M in Seed funding.
Backers included General Catalyst, Chris Manning and Richard Socher from AIX Ventures, Fellows Fund, Hyphen Capital, and First Check Ventures as well as executives from Microsoft, Meta, Rappi, PayClip and more.
The company intends to use the funds to build out engineering and other internal teams.
Led by CEO Belinda Mo, Viva is a cross-language translation tool that helps freelancers and remote teams around the world, allowing them to work for U.S. companies without English language fluency. Founded by a team of Stanford researchers, the company allows non-English speaking professionals to discover, secure, and work at remote jobs.
It provides an automatic Spanish-English translation platform designed for work environments. Unlike Google Translate and other similar translation tools, Viva Translate focuses on translating intent accurately for the context of freelancer-client communications. Starting as a Chrome browser extension, Viva’s AI-powered natural language programming (NLP) translation product will automatically translate newly written Spanish communications into English as the user writes. The tool also detects grammatical and industry-specific improvements and clarifications that users can review.
Separately, the Viva Translate extension also provides recommendations for remote job openings that non-fluent English speakers can apply for, tailored to each user’s skill set and résumé.
Focused initially on the millions of Spanish-speaking professionals across Latin America, the solution is now accepting requests from prospective users to try out the technology.
The company has already amassed a waitlist of more than 100,000 professionals from the IT/engineering, design, administrative, data entry and customer service industries eager to use the platform.
FinSMEs
20/02/2022