Beijing-based natural language processing (NLP) startup Zhongke Fanyu secured an eight-figure investment in yuan for a Series A round from investors Neovision Capital and JC Capital. The company, incubated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Automation in 2018, focuses on vertical NLP applications.
Zhongke Fanyu integrates machine translation services for over 70 languages in areas like healthcare, finance, and legal services. Its clients include governments, enterprises, and organizations in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Some of the startup’s other notable clients include Huawei, Alibaba, Kingsoft, and Lenovo.
The company has five main products which can be customized with neural networks, domain knowledge, termbases, and memory banks, adapting solutions for different industries in one to two weeks. For example, one of Zhongke Fanyu’s solutions translates 100,000 flight logs per day in real time for an international airline.
The future for NLP products, which combine AI and linguistics, looks promising. The global market value for NLP solutions is set to surpass USD 160 billion in 2021 and continue with a strong growth trajectory through 2025, according to a forecast from Trantiac. Zhongke Fanyu hopes that its vertical approach will allow it to carve out niches within the market, while tech giants like Google, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent currently focus on broader, general use solutions.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content published by 36Kr. This article was originally written by the mononymous Ben for 36Kr.