Tokyo university VC arm leads US$1.3M seed round of audio, video transcription app Auris AI

AI Communis, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) startup based in Singapore, has raised US$1.3 million in seed funding.

Todai IPC (the VC arm of the University of Tokyo) led the round, which also saw participation from multiple Japanese VC funds and angel investors from Singapore.

AI Communis was founded in 2020 by Nobuhiko Suzuki (former Director at The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ) and Ian Lane (Associate Professor in NLP at the University of California, Santa Cruz). The firm offers Auris AI, a web-based platform that automatically generates transcripts and subtitles from audio and video files. It also translates between English and other languages, particularly Asian languages like Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and Hindi.

Using its ASR technology, Auris AI can specialise in Asian languages and drive down operating costs, making it more affordable for users.

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Since its beta launch in December 2021, it claims to have garnered over 90,000 users (content creators, media companies and freelancers) across 200 countries.

The firm will use the capital to solidify Auris AI’s product offerings and scale operations in Asia. Operationally, Auris AI will strengthen outreach to global content creators and multi-channel networks to help them reach a wider audience.

At the same time, it will promote the full-scale expansion of the service to freelance and full-time content creators in Southeast Asia.

According to a report published by Google, Temasek and Bain, 60 million new internet users have come online in Southeast Asia since 2020 with the onset of COVID-19, bringing Internet penetration in the region to 75 per cent. The creator economy is also growing and is estimated to be around US$13.8 billion, according to Statista. Even with an increased demand to make content more accessible, no other company is working on scalable software to transcribe and translate Asian languages.

Nobuhiko Suzuki, Co-Founder and CEO of AI Communis, said: “There is a growing demand for people to enjoy foreign videos and to share their content with audiences overseas. In terms of transcribing, translating and subtitling content to make Asian content accessible to the world and foreign content accessible to Asians, we can fill a large gap. With Auris AI, we are creating a platform that allows people to do just that.”

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