Driving digital economy
Reverie Language Technologies offers support for 50 global languages, has 500 million end users and is now making the platform available to app developers for exponential growth.
It was year 2000, when Arvind Pani while working at Intel, anticipated that languages would be a challenge in the mobile phone segment and mentioned it to his brother Vivekanand Pani that they should get into the mobile technology space. He recollects: However, we realized that those were early years for such a technology to commercially enter the market as mobile phones were very expensive and those who could afford one could surely talk in English. But the thought stayed on. By 2008, scenario began to change quickly, India’s mobile phone subscriber base was touching a new high month-on-month. And that’s when the Pani duo felt the time is right to launch Reverie Language Technologies. Vivekanand Pani got his senior colleague SK Mohanty, with whom he had worked with in C-DAC Language computing department, also on board as he had expertise on the nuances of fonts and user experience. Teamed with Vivekanand’s expertise in language tools and algorithms the troika turned out to be a good team.
Reverie provides services over cloud To emerge as a market leader in a segment that has no precedence. Managing longer sales cycles Focus on large enterprises
Arvind Pani, Vivekanand Pani and SK Mohanty 2009 30 platform which makes scaling up for customers extremely easy. “We have solutions for every stakeholders in the ecosystem – device manufacturers, app developers, content writers, endconsumers, service providers, consumer internet companies. The plugnplay model and providing Language as a Service, we ensure that our clients can focus on their core expertise leaving language related implementation to our experts,” says Arvind Pani.
However, the journey has been challenging. “Main challenge was when we started approaching clients,” he elaborates. Most of the smartphone brands were seeing healthy sales numbers and didn’t see a demand for language rich handsets. “It took us a long time to educate and make our clients aware that if they have to penetrate the underserved India market, they would have to provide their customers with language support. Some of the market leaders anticipated this demand coming from their consumers and powered their devices with our platform. We are happy to say that all our clients have seen a positive effect on their sales by providing local language features on their devices,” adds Pani.
Fortunately, for Pani duo funding came just-in-time when they were ready to enter the market with the commercial product. It came to them in the form of Q-Prize win in 2011 from Qualcomm and a high networth individual investor from the US. The company has been generating revenues and has become profitable in the last two years.
“Now to expand to new markets and business segments within India and even other emerging markets, we are looking to raise a round of funding in 2015,” says Arvind Pani adding that the focus for the next 18 months is to scale up. The company has set its sights on Southeast Asia, Africa and Middle East markets as well. In India, the company is already working with various government departments such as land records department in Karnataka.
The company offering support for 50 global languages already has 500 million end users and is now working at making the platform available to app developers to build further on it and bring speed to opening many inaccessible markets across verticals.