BANGALORE: Helion Venture Partners, a $605-million (Rs 3,720-crore) venture fund, has invested an undisclosed amount in Pune-based LinguaNext Technologies. The startup has developed a technology that can convert business software into any local language.
LinguaNext which provides this technology to customers such as State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank and German software maker SAP, will use the funds to expand in international markets, hire talent and scale up its mobile platform.
“Our immediate focus is to entrench ourselves deeper in the US and Japanese markets, along with increasing our rate of growth in India,” LinguaNext chief executive Jagdish Sahasrabudhe said. An alumnus of Queensland University of Technology, Sahasrabudhe who worked as vice president for solutions engineering at SAP cofounded LinguaNext in 2010 along with Rajeevlochan Phadke, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay.
The technology developed by LinguaNext enables enterprise applications to be localised into multiple languages without making any changes to the application code or database.
Sahasrabudhe said their platform has enabled several enterprises and software vendors to quickly bridge language gaps by enabling localisation in weeks as opposed to months or years.
“The Indian vernacular languages gave us so much breadth and width of language complexities,” said Sahasrabudhe. “If our product works in India, it will work in any part of the world.”
Helion said LinguaNext’s unique intellectual property, profitable operating model and globally competitive management teams contributed to their investment decision.
“Linguanext, in a true sense, is allowing the power of software applications to be available to the ‘aam aadmi’,” said Alok Goyal, partner at Helion Advisors.
Goyal is of the view that the firm is essentially allowing a democratisation of software for the masses who could not otherwise access applications for “dearth of specific language skills applicable only to the elite”.
“We expect LinguaNext to become the de facto language management platform across all kinds of devices and software applications,” said Goyal, who prior to joining Helion last year in January, was chief operating officer at SAP India and led an initiative to make software applications available in Hindi. “The problem is universal and massive.”