AI-powered translation startup XL8 raises $2.7 million in bridge investment

Artificial intelligence-powered translation startup XL8 Inc. said on Monday it raised 3.6 billion won ($2.7 million) in a bridge round prior to Series A. 

Atinum Investment Co. led this round of fundraising with additional input from existing investor FuturePlay. 

The Silicon Valley-based startup is founded by former employees of global tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Qualcomm. Its research and development (R&D) center is located inside the Yangjae AI hub in South Korea. 

The company attributes the high quality of its products to the Deep Neural Network Technologies for more than 66 language pairs.

The aim is to create a translation engine that is as human-like as possible, with the specific goal of targeting media and entertainment localization.

“The demand for content translations and dubbing has been skyrocketing around the globe but there is a hard limit to the supply of translators,” General Partner at Atinum Investment Co. Maeng Doo-jing told The Korea Economic Daily. 

Maeng is confident XL8’s specialized machine learning engine for content translation will be the answer to the supply shortage. 

The startup is collaborating with Iyuno SDI Group for the localization of video content on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+.

The initial translation is done by XL8’s machine translation and human translators put the finishing touches to the brought drafts. 

David Lee founded SDI Group, a Seoul-based language service provider (LSP) with 67 offices in 34 countries.

TIP-TOP TALENT

XL8's CEO Tim Young-hoon Jung co-founded the tech startup in 2019 after leading a team of researchers’ efforts to apply artificial neural networks to natural language processing (NLP) at Google. 

Co-Founder and CTO Park Jin-hyung is a former Apple engineer, who now works as the startup’s Head of Engineering.

The finished product by XL8 is thought to be especially strong in translating colloquial conversations.

The company translated more than 500,000 hours of video content or 2.4 billion words since its foundation. 

In April, XL8 was selected to benefit from The Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ Tech Incubator Program for Start-up (TIPS).

It was also selected as part of Wings, a career development program run by Gyeonggi Province. 

MEDIACAT LAUNCH

In the latter half of this year, XL8 plans to introduce a video translation tool it dubs MediaCAT, short for Media Computer Assisted Translation. 

The new Machine Translation-Post Edit (MT-PE) product will be an advanced version of the existing solution by incorporating an editing function. 

When a user uploads a video, the program will automatically extract lines and sync the time code. The lines will be translated into the language of choice and even dubbed in the chosen language. 

“In addition to adjusting the subtitles into lengths appropriate for the screen, MediaCAT will distinguish different speakers in a single frame, recognize the verbs based on context, and choose the pronouns accordingly to relieve translators of repetitive work,” Jung said.

Write to Lan Heo at why@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.