India has a population of over a billion with an overall literacy rate of more than 76%, however, English literacy is rate is below 10%. Thus more than 60% of the population is literate and read or watch regional content. With the digital revolution in the country, there is a demand and a big market for content in regional languages. Be it information display at the airports or railway stations. Today, every PSU banks and institutions have moved onto digital platforms to reach out to their customer base, however, their biggest challenge is language. According to a report released earlier this year by Counterpoint Research, India has surpassed the US in terms of active smartphone users crossing 220 million mark. As per IAMAI, close to 50% of Indian smartphone users consumed content in their local language online. If this trend will continue, local languages will overtake English in the coming months. Regional language support market is pegged at $3.5-4 bn annually with a CAGR of 30%.
Reverie, a Bangalore-based company, is a market leader in providing regional language solutions for digital platforms. Be it text display, text input or content processing for a mobile phone, mobile app or mobile content or on the web.
The company provides solutions for the entire ecosystem which comprise of device OEMs, app developers and content providers, consumer internet companies and large enterprises. Started by Arvind Pani, Vivekanand Pani and S K Mohanty in Nov 2009 with an aim to empower end users with an option of using their preferred languages while surfing, reading or transacting online.
Reverie has filed for 4 patents and 20 plus design copyrights. The company has the capability to provide support in more than 50 global languages of which 22 are Indian languages. The company has developed a cloud based Language as a service platform, which can support difficult languages like Arabic too. It has been recognised by Nasscom as an innovative start up and has won an award for that too. It counts companies like HDFC Securities, Micromax, Karbonn, Spice, Ola, Practo, Snapdeal among its clients.
Expansion plansReverie is now ready to take its product to other emerging economies of the World. The company will be entering the West Asian market by this year-end. The firm has recently also signed Accenture and Intel as their clients too. Reverie is assisting Accenture in implementing e-gov and m-gov projects by providing language capabilities to reach to the end user.
Recently, HDFC Securities went live using Reverie multilingual solutions to become India’s first trading house to offer stock trading services in local languages over HDFC Sec Android app.
A big achievement for Reverie is the launch of Micromax’s Unite 2. It is World’s first phone to support 21 languages and this phone is powered by Reverie’s platform.
Qualcomm, which is another big client of Reverie, will be using its solutions and will reach out to its global clients. Qualcomm and Reverie have joined hands for this initiative.
AchievementsReverie has been recognised as the best company for local language technologies by top companies like Qualcomm, Vodafone and Microsoft
Reverie has won Microsoft Code of Honour award. The Code of Honour initiative launched by Microsoft last year saw applications from 2000 companies and developers of which only 6 were chosen as winners and Reverie is one of the chosen ones.
In 2011 Reverie also won Qualcomm’s Q-Prize in India. Interestingly, the winning amount $1,00,000 actually worked as seed funding for Reverie and it also helped them roll out their product commercially.
Company has raised Series A funding of $4 million last year from Aspada and Qualcomm Ventures.
Why Reverie has the edge?Reverie team believes that apart from developing language solutions, a superlative user experience will ensure high user engagement. And that's what the team focuses on. Reverie language experience includes quality of fonts, content discovery experience, keypad, good content. The company develops its fonts and transliteration technology in-house. They have a full suite of service which address every stakeholder in the ecosystem -- OEMs, content developers, app developers, consumer Internet companies.
The company provides its service through LaaS, which is a cloud based platform which allows a client to just plug n play language solutions for its devices. This ensures shortest go-to-market time.
