Top Japanese VCs and Global Angel Investors Back the Seattle‑ and Tokyo‑Based Startup, Fueling Product Development
Kotoba Technologies, a pioneer in AI-powered simultaneous translation and real-time speech AI for Asian languages, announced the closing of a USD 11.83 million Seed 2 funding round. The financing was led by Globis Capital Partners and Boost Capital, with continued participation from SIP Capital and a group of prominent global angel investors.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250805128670/en/
“Our mission is to develop the world’s most advanced speech AI—making multilingual human-to-human seamless,” said Noriyuki Kojima, Ph.D., Co-founder & CEO. “This new capital will enable us to expand our teams and accelerate both R&D and large-scale commercial rollout.”
Fast-growing product tractions
At NVIDIA AI Summit Japan, Kotoba surprised thousands by using its real-time speech AI to transcribe live the interpretation of Jensen Huang’s monologue and dialogue.
Since then, Kotoba has driven development to enable AI-powered simultaneous translation in production—not just live transcription. In March, it released DOTSU, its speech-to-text simultaneous-interpretation iOS app. Within three months, DOTSU recorded logged 500K sessions and received major media coverage for its sub-500 ms latency.
Pushing the experience to speech‑to‑speech, Kotoba’s end-to-end model now approaches sub-3s average latency on Japanese↔English at human-interpreter quality—and aiming 500 ms for Japanese↔Korean.
Kotoba plans global deployments in August at flagship press events, marking one of the first practical AI-powered speech-to-speech simultaneous translation rollouts in a high-profile setting. Kotoba will also soon rolls out the most expressive TTS models in Japanese.
Investor perspectives
Hidekazu “Emre” Yuasa, Partner, Globis Capital Partners
“Kotoba is developing extremely sophisticated speech‑to‑speech foundation models that will remove language barriers across Asia and beyond. We’re proud to support their global ambitions.”
Justin Turkat, Founder & Managing Partner, SIP Capital
“Kotoba is trailblazing the future of voice AI, right here in Japan. We’ve backed Nori, Jungo and the team since 2023 and are excited to continue the journey.”
Dr. Joi Ito, Former Director, MIT Media Lab; Co‑Founder and Director, Digital Garage, Inc.; President, Chiba Institute of Technology
“I’m thrilled to see two exceptional PhDs from top U.S. universities building cutting‑edge, real‑time speech AI solutions right here in Japan. I’m excited to support Kotoba Technologies on their journey toward global impact.”
Dr. Thomas Wolf, Co‑Founder and Chief Science Officer, HuggingFace
“Very excited about the extremely fast, simultaneous speech translation that Kotoba is building. Generative AI has the potential to break huge language barriers in Japan and Asia, bringing communities together and catalyzing development.”
About Kotoba Technologies
Founded in 2023 by Cornell and University of Washington PhDs Noriyuki Kojima (CEO) and Jungo Kasai (CTO), Kotoba Technologies develops state-of-the-art foundation models for real-time speech applications. The company recently appointed Yusuke Shimomura as Chief Business Officer.
Headquarters: Seattle, USA
Japan Office: Otemachi, Tokyo
X: @kotoba_tech
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250805128670/en/
Kotoba Technologies raises $11.83M to accelerate real-time AI-powered speech translation.
Contacts
Media Contact: cooyama@kotoba.tech
