Taiwanese startup WritePath’s AI tech accelerates monetary disclosure translation

In nations the place English isn’t a fundamental language, listed corporations not solely should take care of monetary disclosure rules, however make sure that their investor supplies can be found in English for international backers. WritePath make the method sooner and scalable by combining its AI tech with human translators. The Taipei-based startup’s purchasers embody Foxconn, ASUS, China Airline, the Taiwan Stock Exchange and Taiwan Mobile.

WritePath introduced that it has raised $340,000 in pre-Series A funding, led by Quantum International Corp. CEO Alex Lee. The spherical additionally noticed participation from angel traders like jobstreet.com founder Mark Chang. WritePath’s earlier traders embody byUDN.com, a subsidiary of United Daily, one of many largest media group in Taiwan, and Singaporean translation agency Elite Asia.

Thealike first lined WritePath again in 2014 when it was an essay modifying service for faculty candidates, technical writers and tutorial researchers. Founder and CEO Charles Chen mentioned the corporate determined to modify focus as a result of essay modifying was labor intensive and arduous to scale because it needed to purchase new purchasers yearly. WritePath initially provided B2C translation companies, earlier than its crew noticed that governments in Asia are implementing extra English-language disclosure insurance policies, together with for listed corporations.

The firm’s platform combines tech like Warren, its in-house machine translation engine, with human translators. Warren was skilled on a language corpus of a number of million Chinese-to-English sentences gathered from monetary, annual and ESG experiences.

One of the rationale for brand new disclosure insurance policies is investor activism and the passage of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) within the European Union. MiFID II is a legislative framework that requires extra transparency by corporations, together with regulatory reporting, to guard traders. Its buying and selling guidelines included requiring brokers to cost funds for analysis individually from buying and selling charges. Many funds started looking for information from listed companies’ IR and ESG departments, as a substitute of counting on fairness analysis experiences.

“As a result, though, small and mid-cap companies may find themselves easily overlooked,” Chen mentioned. “So having their information presented professionally in English helps give them a boost and ensure they don’t fall off the investment radar.” He added that extra corporations in Asia markets, together with Taiwan, China, Korea and Southeast Asian nations, will begin publishing disclosures in English as capital markets mature and develop.

Before turning to WritePath, a lot of its purchasers used conventional translation companies or translation companies provided by the Big 4 accounting companies to supply English-language experiences. Chen mentioned one among WritePath’s benefits is that its expertise, together with Warren and corpora administration system T-Booster, maintains consistency in company language and terminology. This means its human translators can concentrate on the standard of content material, reviewing sentences for accuracy.

WritePath additionally provides a “self-service” resolution for materials data that must be disclosed inside 24 hours. This allows purchasers to order and handle translations via WritePath’s portal. Part of its new funding will likely be used to improve the portal so it might probably course of a number of recordsdata and batches that are available at completely different instances, however have to be delivered directly.

Chen mentioned WritePath differentiates from monetary printers like Toppan Merrill, R.R. Donnelly and Pronexus by combining human translators with AI tech in its workflow. EQS and MZ are on-line IR disclosure instruments, however require translation assist after they publish data in nations that don’t use English as a fundamental language. Another firm within the monetary disclosure area is Fiscalnote, but it surely focuses on knowledge, like ESG data, as a substitute of translation.

The funding will used to increase WritePath’s translation companies for listed corporations and add extra verticals, like design and format for ESG experiences.