High-Quality Interpretation Tailored to Each Company and Industry
"An Experience Like Having In-House Interpreters Fluent in 20 Languages"
Cuckoo Labs, the developer of the enterprise AI simultaneous interpretation service "Cuckoo," announced on November 4 that it has secured $1.8 million (approximately 2.5 billion KRW) in seed funding. The investment round included participation from Y Combinator, a renowned accelerator based in Silicon Valley, as well as Smilegate Investment, Mashup Ventures, Base Ventures, Schmidt, and BonAngels Venture Partners.
Cuckoo is an enterprise AI simultaneous interpretation service designed for global sales, marketing, and customer support. It learns from internal documents and glossaries in real time to provide customized interpretation tailored to each company and industry. The more meetings are held, the more accurate the service becomes. According to Cuckoo Labs, it offers "an experience akin to having in-house interpreters fluent in over 20 languages."
Cuckoo Labs was founded by CEO Lee Yonghee and CTO Kim Geonwoo, who are both alumni of KAIST. They have successfully executed product development and go-to-market strategies at companies such as Krafton and VESSL AI. They decided to launch the company after recognizing that even large global enterprises struggle to access high-quality interpretation services that understand technical terminology and product context.
Cuckoo demonstrated its potential for global success by being selected for Y Combinator's W25 batch in January this year. In July, the company launched its AI Video Localization service, enabling enterprises to generate customized subtitles in multiple languages within minutes, which was met with a strong response. Within just six months of launching its service, Cuckoo secured major global clients such as Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Weights & Biases, as well as Asia-focused tech companies. In particular, demand has been high among U.S. tech firms expanding into the Asian market via Japan.
CEO Lee Yonghee stated, "Our ultimate goal is to enable global companies to work faster and more efficiently without language barriers throughout their entire work process. Starting with in-house AI simultaneous interpretation and content localization services, we aim to evolve into an enterprise language AI platform used worldwide."
Park Eunwoo, Partner at Mashup Ventures, who participated in the investment, commented, "While the professional interpretation market is rapidly growing due to advances in AI technology and increased global collaboration, there is still a lack of high-quality interpretation services that accurately understand business context and industry terminology. Cuckoo is a team with both technical expertise and business acumen, and it has already shown meaningful results in the global market from the early stages, so we expect strong growth going forward."
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