Bluente, a Singapore-based AI document translation platform, has raised US$1.5 million in a seed-plus funding round led by Informed Ventures.
The tool can translate various types of documents, including contracts and slide decks, into more than 120 languages while preserving all tables, charts, images, and layouts intact.
Founder Daphne Tay said she got the idea after spending “countless hours” at Bain fixing and reformatting translated documents for global projects.
“I was doing exactly what our clients do now — copying and pasting text from translation tools, fixing formatting, and losing hours that should have been spent on actual consulting work,” she said.
Tay started Bluente in 2021. The company’s first product was a business-focused language learning app, similar to Duolingo, designed for legal and financial terms. When that idea didn’t succeed, she shifted the focus to document translation, she told Business Insider.
Unlike many founders who pitch to dozens of VCs, Bluente’s funding process was simple—Informed Ventures reached out to them directly.
“They actually faced the same problem themselves,” Tay said, adding that the firm’s partners had worked as bankers handling multilingual transactions.
Tay told Business Insider that the new funding will be used to expand into the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and the US, and to grow the company’s six-person team.
The first hires will be in sales, followed later by product and engineering roles.
Part of the funding will go toward pushing past translation, with plans to develop advanced document processing infrastructure, Tay said.
The company said in a press release on Thursday that it has more than 70 enterprise customers, including law firms, financial institutions, government agencies, and Fortune 500 companies.
Tay said Bluente’s main competitor is DeepL, a German translation startup valued at $1 billion. However, Bluente stands out by focusing more on the document processing side of translation.
With Microsoft research flagging translators as among the professions most likely to be disrupted by AI, Bluente is positioning itself as infrastructure for global document workflows, not just another translation app, Tay said.
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