There are over 7,000 languages spoken globally but English has dominated the innovation and advancements in natural language processing, leaving a massive void for much of the world’s population and those that are building solutions for these audiences. Languages spoken in Eastern Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are considered “low-resource languages”. NeuralSpace is a startup that provides an interface and a suite of advanced functionality through APIs that bring natural language processing capabilities that will work with these often-neglected languages along with more common ones. The platform recognizes intent, detect languages, transliterate, identify speakers in audio files, transcribe speech into text, and more. NeuralSpace is a no-code web interface that can be used without any specialized machine learning or data science background. By eliminating the barrier of language with its seamless solution, the platform ensures that innovators can build truly global and borderless solutions for 6B individuals.
London TechWatch caught up with NeuralSpace CEO and Cofounder Felix Laumann to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $1.82M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a seed round that was led by Merus Capital with participation from APX (the joint venture arm of Porsche and Axel Springer), Techstars, Verissimo, and a few impactful angels. We raised $1.7Mfor the seed round.
Tell us about your product or service.
NeuralSpace is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform which offers developers a no-code web interface and a suite of APIs for Natural Language Processing (NLP) that they can use without having any Machine Learning (ML) or Data Science knowledge. The NeuralSpace Platform currently consists of six language processing features, which we call Apps: NeuraLingo, Entity Recognition, Neural Machine Translation, Transliteration, NeuralAug, and Language Detection. NeuralSpace offers these Apps in more than 80 languages spoken across India, South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, which can be called low-resource languages.
What inspired the start of NeuralSpace?
NeuralSpace started with the vision to create technology that could take humanity a step further by bridging the massive language gap that is prevalent around the world and prevents many from accessing vital services or education. Low-resource languages often have only 1% of the total data available compared to high-resource languages like English, French or Spanish. To tackle this problem, we developed proprietary algorithms that are very data-efficient without any compromise on their performance. We have always had in our mind to give software developers the simplest possible user interface to build language technology, such as voice recognition, into their products. This led us to integrate AutoNLP and AutoMLOps in all of our Apps and our customers do not need to worry about how to implement the latest deep learning models or how to scale a huge model to process thousands of requests every minute.
How is it different?
NeuralSpace is the first language technology company that focuses on low-resource languages spoken in Asia, Africa, and Scandinavia. Most of the countries in these geographies have a very diverse language landscape (for example, more than 270 languages are spoken in India) but their citizens do want to use devices with language technology (such as Amazon’s Alexa) in their mother tongue.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We target the entire Asian and African language technology market and aspire to become the go-to provider for NLP services in local languages spoken on these two continents. Revenues in these geographies are estimated to reach $2.5B by 2025.
What’s your business model?
We have a pay-as-you-go freemium model and our customers are charged by how many API requests they send to the NeuralSpace Platform. We give every new customer 10,000 API requests for free and even give $500 worth of credits at the moment.
What are your post-COVID office plans?
NeuralSpace has been a remote company since its commencement in 2019. Our team members are from diverse locations such as India, the UK, and Switzerland. We do try to meet in person about every three months but things have run smoothly in a remote fashion from day one.
What was the funding process like?
We were lucky that we were accepted at the Techstars accelerator programme last year, which gave us lots of exposure to potential investors. Our response rate with cold outreaches has also been very high, around 40-50%, so it was not too difficult to get on a call and pitch to VCs and angels alike. Given that we are a deep tech startup, it was sometimes difficult to explain our product to investors, but the ones who had experience with language technology were quickly convinced. For instance, it took us not even two weeks between the first call and receiving a term sheet from our lead investor. However, it was a bit of a headache afterward because one of our competitors tried really hard to ruin this funding round for us and kill us as a company altogether. We were first surprised that a big player sees us as such a threat but were not much disturbed by it overall. We saw it as a learning opportunity that is part of the startup life and closed our round how we wanted in the end.
We were lucky that we were accepted at the Techstars accelerator programme last year, which gave us lots of exposure to potential investors. Our response rate with cold outreaches has also been very high, around 40-50%, so it was not too difficult to get on a call and pitch to VCs and angels alike. Given that we are a deep tech startup, it was sometimes difficult to explain our product to investors, but the ones who had experience with language technology were quickly convinced. For instance, it took us not even two weeks between the first call and receiving a term sheet from our lead investor. However, it was a bit of a headache afterward because one of our competitors tried really hard to ruin this funding round for us and kill us as a company altogether. We were first surprised that a big player sees us as such a threat but were not much disturbed by it overall. We saw it as a learning opportunity that is part of the startup life and closed our round how we wanted in the end.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Probably the time after we received our term sheet when the competitor wanted to ruin our funding round. Investors were understandably not sure about their decision anymore and it became suddenly very clear who of our confirmed investors were founders before their investment career and who were not. The ones who have supported us and promised that they will not let us down, while the ones who had no startup experience by themselves were more suspicious. Some of them dropped out in the end but we were luckily oversubscribed, so other investors took the chance to get in.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The clear lack of language technology in local languages in Asia and Africa, and our team consists of some of the best NLP scientists and engineers. We have an ambitious vision, that is, to break down the language barrier for good, and a motivated team to work towards this vision day and night.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We have already seen huge interest and have had more than 50 signups on the NeuralSpace Platform in the first five days after its launch. The goal for the next six months is to increase this number at least tenfold.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Working on a startup without external funding is very difficult because technology emerges so quickly these days. I have the highest respect for everyone who tries to bootstrap their company but it must be an outstanding idea coupled with operational excellence to make it a success. Often I see companies that are very dependent on revenue end up becoming almost a service provider and considerably deviate from their initial vision. This is too bad because a service provider can rarely reach as many people as product companies do. My only advice is to speak as much as you can to your (potential) customers, build a product that fulfills most of their demands, and then go full in and build this product.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
As I said, we aspire to establish ourselves as the go-to provider for NLP services in low-resource languages. The notion will always be on how software and mobile application developers can implement NLP features into their products with as little knowledge as possible about ML and Data Science. We plan to work with the best researchers and UX designers in this field to provide an unmet experience to developers that allows them to integrate a voice command system, an automated summarization, or a sentiment analysis, besides many other language technologies, just with a click of a button.
We are planning to be in a position to raise a Series A in the summer of 2023.
What’s your favourite outdoor activity in London?
London is the greatest city I have ever lived in and I totally feel at home here. I love taking walks around Woodberry Downs and Clissold Park and trying Iranian, Brazilian, and many other cuisines.
