A former Bain & Company consultant raised $1.5 million for her AI startup that solves one of the headaches she faced every day.
The Singapore startup, Bluente, is betting that professionals will pay for a faster way to translate documents without losing their formatting.
The tool works across documents from contracts to slide decks, offering translations in over 120 languages while keeping every table, chart, image, and layout intact.
Founder Daphne Tay said she came up with the idea after spending “countless hours” at Bain reformatting translated documents for international 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 launched Bluente in 2021. The company’s first product was a business-focused language-learning app — a Duolingo for legal and financial terms. When that didn’t work out, she pivoted to document translation, Tay told Business Insider.
Bluente raised $1.5 million in a seed-plus round led by Menlo Park-based Informed Ventures. No other investors participated, and Tay declined to share the company’s valuation.
Unlike most founders who pitch dozens of VCs, Bluente’s process was short. Informed Ventures approached the company 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 the fresh funding will go toward go-to-market expansion in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and the US, as well as new hires to expand the company’s six-person team.
The company plans to hire salespeople first, followed 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.
Bluente’s biggest rival is DeepL, a German translation startup valued at $1 billion, Tay said, adding that Bluente differentiates itself by focusing more on the document processing layer.
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.
Check out the pitch deck Bluente used to secure the fresh funding.
