Cuckoo Labs, the developer of the enterprise AI simultaneous interpretation service ‘Cuckoo’, announced that it has attracted USD 1.8 million (KRW 2.5 billion) in seed investment. This investment round saw participation from prominent investors including U.S.-based Y Combinator, Smilegate Investment, Mashup Ventures, Bass Ventures, Schmidt, and BonAngels Venture Partners.

Cuckoo is an enterprise AI simultaneous interpretation service designed for global sales, marketing, and customer support. It provides customized interpretation tailored to each company and industry by learning internal documents and glossaries in real-time. A key feature is its increasing accuracy as learning accumulates through repeated meetings, offering an experience akin to having in-house interpreters fluent in over 20 languages.

Co-founders Yong-hee Lee, CEO, and Gun-woo Kim, CTO, both KAIST alumni, have a proven track record of successfully executing product development and market entry strategies at companies such as Krafton and VESSL AI. The two founders decided to establish the company after recognizing the difficulty even large global corporations face in securing high-quality interpretation services that accurately understand technical jargon and product context.

Cuckoo demonstrated its potential for global market success by being selected for Y Combinator’s W25 batch in January of this year. In July, it launched an AI Video Localization service, which has been well-received for enabling companies to generate customized subtitles in multiple languages within minutes.

Within six months of its service launch, Cuckoo has secured global companies such as Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Weights & Biases, as well as tech companies expanding into the Asian market, as key clients. Notably, there is high demand from U.S. tech companies entering the Asian market with Japan as their base.

Eun-woo Park, a partner at Mashup Ventures, who participated in this investment, stated, “While the professional interpretation market is rapidly growing due to advancements in AI technology and increased global collaboration, there is a shortage of high-quality interpretation services that accurately understand corporate context and industry terminology. Cuckoo is a team with both technical expertise and business acumen, showing significant achievements in the global market from its early stages, and its future growth is highly anticipated.”

Yong-hee Lee, CEO of Cuckoo Labs, said, “Our ultimate goal is to enable global companies to work faster and more efficiently without language barriers throughout their entire business process. Starting with in-house AI simultaneous interpretation and content localization services, we aim to evolve into an enterprise language AI platform used worldwide.”