Bluente co-founder and CEO Daphne Tay
At Bain & Co., Daphne Tay often found herself stuck in the same frustrating loop: spending hours reformatting translated documents, fixing broken tables, and restoring layouts that existing translation tools had mangled. The translation itself was never the problem; the “last mile” of formatting ate up precious time.
“I realised this wasn’t just my problem. It was a universal inefficiency across law firms, consulting, finance, and multinational companies,” recalls Tay, now co-founder and CEO of Bluente. “That’s when it clicked: translation isn’t only about language. It’s about workflow and precision.”
Building a translation engine for documents, not just text
Founded in 2021, Bluente is an AI-powered translation platform designed to solve that last-mile pain point. Its one-click engine translates to and from more than 120 languages while preserving exact formatting (text, images, numbers, tables, and units) across contracts, PDFs, and PowerPoints.
Also Read: Bluente lands US$1.5M to scale AI-driven document translation worldwide
“Most translation tools are built around text. Bluente was built around documents,” Tay explains. “Our engine doesn’t just translate words; it preserves structure, context, and compliance. In regulated, format-sensitive industries, a misplaced clause isn’t a typo but a liability. That’s where Bluente stands apart.”
Rethinking a legacy industry
According to Tay, traditional translation companies still run on human-heavy workflows, treating technology as an afterthought. Even when artificial intelligence (AI) is adopted, it’s typically layered on top of legacy systems, leading to patchy outcomes, slow turnarounds, and high costs.
Bluente, by contrast, reimagined the process end-to-end. But that came with its own challenges. “PDFs, for instance, are image- and layout-first, not text-first. Extracting and reinserting content accurately is extremely error-prone,” she says. “Tables with merged cells, multilingual footnotes, scanned contracts; these were nightmares. We had to build custom engines for parsing, layout reconstruction, and multilingual character support. Refining that took years.”
Backed to scale across borders
The effort is paying off. Bluente recently closed a US$1.5 million seed round led by Informed Ventures, targeting expansion into the Middle East, wider APAC, and the US–regions dense with international firms navigating cross-border transactions.
“Each region presents a distinct need: Arabic requires right-to-left formatting, APAC brings multilingual complexity, and the US has sheer market opportunity. Our platform is designed to scale while adapting locally,” Tay says.
The AI question: Job killer or productivity engine?
With Microsoft research suggesting translators are among the most at-risk professions from AI disruption, Tay is quick to reframe the narrative.
“Translation isn’t disappearing; it’s evolving,” she argues. “Humans shouldn’t waste time fixing formatting or repetitive clauses. Bluente eliminates that grunt work so professionals can focus on nuance, strategy, and value creation. We’re not killing jobs; we’re killing tasks.”
Beyond translation: A multilingual OS for business documents
For Tay, translation is only the wedge. “It’s the most painful entry point, but our vision is much broader: multilingual document infrastructure,” she reveals. “Ultimately, we want to build the operating system for global business documents.”
Also Read: Is AI making it harder for tech startups to survive?
On being a female founder in a deep-tech sector, Tay is candid: “If you build something genuinely useful, gender becomes secondary. That’s been true in our product journey and in this fundraise.”
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