Conversation AI Platform Language I/O Raises $5 Million
Language I/O Would Channelize Resources to Enable Real-Time Communication with Customers in any Language over any Channel
Language I/O, powering meaningful conversations between global organizations and their customers, announced it has raised $5 million in A round funding. This is significant as the company was bootstrapped since 2015, except for the seed round of $500,000 in October 2020. Bob Davoli of Gutbrain Ventures and Bruce Clarke of PBJ Capital co-led the round, and were joined by other investors including Omega Venture Partners, Michael Wilens, Tom Axbey and Eric Schnadig. Golden Seeds participated in the original seed round as well as this latest round of funding. Davoli and Axbey will join the Language I/O board of directors along with the two co-founders of Language I/O, CEO Heather Morgan Shoemaker and CBO Kaarina Kvaavik.
“Language I/O is disrupting how businesses communicate with their global customers,” stated Davoli. “The combination of an innovative technology, product market fit and an exceptionally strong team compelled me to invest. Language I/O is eminently poised for tremendous growth.”
In order to succeed, global businesses must give customers in all countries a personalized, local experience regardless of the customer’s native language. Language I/O allows its customers to provide real-time customer support in more than 100 languages, ensuring that company-specific terms are accurately translated through its proprietary core technology. The software is currently focused on translation across all e-support channels including email, articles, chat and social messaging among others. The company is now poised to extend its unique, conversational, B2B translation tech beyond customer support.
“I am extremely proud of our team,” said Heather Morgan Shoemaker, CEO and co-founder at Language I/O. “Language I/O has built a completely unique technology solution to the complicated problem of multilingual support – a solution that has attracted many thriving global enterprises. This investment will allow us to expand our sales and development teams so we can build out our conversational AI translation tech to meet our customer’s needs. It’s been a fantastic journey since I wrote the first line of code in V1 of our software, to receive this recognition of our accomplishments from our investors.”
Unique benefits of Language I/O’s machine translation optimizer are highlighted below.
Accuracy – Language I/O’s AI powered solution identifies the best neural machine translation (NMT) engine for each language the customer chooses to translate. Then it layers proprietary technology over those engines to ensure that messy user-generated content (UGC) such as acronyms, misspellings and jargon are accurately translated every time.
Customization – Language I/O’s also layers company and industry-specific terms over the NMT ensuring that its customers’ industry and company specific terms, such as product names, are always correctly translated.
Security — Language I/O takes security seriously and encrypts all Personally Identifiable Information (PPI) immediately and throughout the platform, and is GDPR compliant and ISO 27001 certified.
Speed – Language I/O’s software solution seamlessly integrates into three of the largest customer relationship management systems (CRMs) Salesforce Service Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud and Zendesk; and is now available via API. The onboarding process is fast and efficient. Organizations can be up and running in less than 24 hours. This is rare in the industry as other provider’s installation requires weeks, if not months, to get up and running with accurate translations.
“We are thrilled to be one of the rare technology companies founded and led by women to receive venture capital funding,” stated Kaarina Kvaavik, Chief Business Officer and co-founder at Language I/O. “This infusion of capital will enable us to provide immediate value to a greater number of organizations by making sure they are communicating accurately with customers. Higher customer satisfaction translates to increased revenue – yes it is that simple.”
Andrea Paragona, Sr. Manager Knowledge Base at Constant Contact, has been using Language I/O’s to interact with its multilingual customers for years.
“Language I/O enables us to deliver our knowledge base content to our expanding international audience in their native language,” Paragona said. “This is extremely meaningful to our customers who can then focus on learning the tool without concern for translation. The integration through Salesforce is seamless and Language I/O executes our content updates very well, we know we are in excellent hands.”
Language I/O enables Fortune 500 companies to communicate with customers anywhere through proprietary machine learning technology, which enables real-time, company-specific translation. The AI technology enables Language I/O to quickly generate accurate, company-specific translations of all user-generated content (UGC) including jargon, slang, abbreviations and misspellings into over 100 languages via chat, email, article and social support channels. Language I/O is accessible directly via API and seamlessly integrates with all major CRMs, including Salesforce Service Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud and Zendesk. Language I/O is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant, ensuring the highest standard of security to protect customer data through PII encryption. Language I/O brought its proprietary technology to market in 2017. The company was co-founded by two women entrepreneurs who bootstrapped the company, wrote the original code and obtained large enterprise customers such as Constant Contact (CTCT), Shutterstock (SSTK), PhotoBox and Brave.
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