Toucan, a startup that helps customers study a brand new language whereas they browse the net, is saying that it has raised an extra $4.5 million in seed funding.
As I wrote final fall, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup has constructed a Chrome extension that scans the textual content of no matter web site you’re studying and interprets choose phrases into whichever language you’re attempting to study. That means you’re increasing your vocabulary with out having to make time to check or in any other case change your habits.
Toucan at the moment helps seven languages — Spanish, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. Co-founder and CEO Taylor Nieman stated the corporate now has round 60,000 month-to-month lively customers, all acquired organically.
“On the surface, Toucan can look like a toy, but there’s massive engineering tech on the backend,” Nieman added.
For one factor, though the startup has a workforce of human translators, it additionally depends on machine studying and pure language processing to know the context of every phrase and ensure it’s being translated correctly. Nieman additionally stated that the corporate additionally takes an clever, customized strategy to the translations that seem over time, permitting them to grow to be extra complicated in an effort to maintain difficult customers.
Image Credits: Toucan
Toucan is free, however customers can subscribe to Toucan Premium, which begins at $4.99 per 30 days and affords a better density of translated phrases. Premium subscribers can even decide in or out of promoting — apparently the flexibility to “own” a phrase (a.okay.a. have your sponsorship message seem anytime that phrase is translated) is widespread sufficient that some paying customers don’t need to lose it.
Toucan has now raised a complete of $7.5 million. The new spherical was led by LightShed Ventures, with participation from new traders Next Play Ventures, Concrete Rose Capital, GingerBread Capital, Form Capital, Goodwater Capital, Hampton VC, Spacecadet Ventures, GTMfund, Baron Davis Enterprises and Human Ventures, in addition to current traders GSV Ventures, Amplifyher Ventures and Vitalize.
“Screen time is escalating globally with younger generations living their lives always connected,” stated LightShed Ventures General Partner Richard Greenfield in a press release. “Toucan seamlessly integrates language learning into the websites (and soon apps) you are already using via a simple browser extension transforming screen time into learning time.”
Nieman stated Toucan will use the brand new funding to increase the workforce from 12 to 16. It’s additionally planning to internationalize — so not simply translating English to Spanish, however Spanish to English, and so forth — and is launching a brand new Safari extension (it’ll assist extra browsers sooner or later). The in the end imaginative and prescient is for Toucan to be “layered wherever you are.”
“We want to be this augmented layer of learning on the web, on mobile browsing, the most popular social apps and even in the physical world,” she stated, predicting that sooner or later, you could be “wearing a crazy cool contact lens that can translate a sign on the subway and provide you with those same micro-moments of learning.”
