Kotoba Technologies Raises $10M for East Asian Voice AI
The investment from Salesforce Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund signals enterprise and hardware interest in real-time voice AI for East Asian languages, where Kotoba's Koto model delivers industry-leading performance.
Reporting from 1 sources: ASCII.jp.
Kotoba Technologies, a real-time voice AI company focused on East Asian languages, raised an additional $10 million in its seed round. The round was led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund. The company's voice foundation model Koto targets Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and is already deployed at Fortune Global 500 companies. Total funding now stands at $23 million.
Kotoba Technologies operates an R&D base in Tokyo and headquarters in San Francisco. Its voice foundation model Koto is designed for real-time applications including AI agents, smart hardware, and simultaneous translation, with latency under two seconds for speech-to-speech translation. The company has released an alpha API and Python SDK to expand developer adoption. The additional funding will go toward speech-to-speech model improvements, on-device deployment, and agent deployment.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.