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The profile

Outlook Business ran one of the earliest substantial profiles of Vitra.ai, in March 2021, three months after the product's public launch. Anishaa Kumar's piece framed the problem in terms any social or marketing team recognises: you can optimise keywords and buy amplification, but if the content is in one language you have capped your audience before you start.

The article records where the name comes from. Vitra.ai is an acronym for Video Translation using AI Tools. Founders Satvik Jagannath and Akash Nidhi P S first hit on the idea in 2017 while entering the Google News Innovation Challenge. That entry was rejected. They returned to it in 2019 when looking for a business to build, on the view that the market had grown into the idea.

The numbers at launch

The comparison that made the case was operational. Translating an hour of video manually meant a transcriber, a linguistic expert, a dubbing artist and a studio, and a turnaround measured in days. Through Vitra.ai, a 30-minute video came back in 10 to 12 minutes, across 50 languages and 20 voices spanning age and gender, for video, audio, text and text-to-speech.

Pricing was the other half of the argument: $3 per minute against the$8 per minute that conventional subtitling houses charged. Jagannath stressed that the engine was context aware rather than literal, with semantic correction plus auto-correction and auto-suggestion.

At the time of writing the company had 25 clients, 20 of them B2B enterprises, on subscriptions from $49 to$999 a month with custom enterprise plans above that, and had raised its first cheque from 100X.VC. The piece sized the global machine translation market at $550 million in 2019, growing at 17$1.5 billion by 2026.

Read against the Vitra.ai platform as it stands now, the profile is a useful marker of how much of the original thesis held: the format coverage and the language count both grew by an order of magnitude, but the core claim, that context-aware translation can be fast and cheap at the same time, is unchanged.

Full coverage

This story was carried across the Indian business press. Every outlet that ran it is linked below.

• Outlook Business — Speak freely to your customers, this translator has your back