Kotoba Technologies Raises $10M to Expand Voice AI Translation Technology

San Francisco- and Tokyo-based voice AI startup Kotoba Technologies has raised $10 million in an additional seed funding round. With the latest investment, the company’s total funding has reached $23 million.

The round was led by Kindred Ventures. Existing and new investors, including Salesforce Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund, also participated.

Funding to Support Speech AI Expansion

Kotoba Technologies said it will use the new capital to further develop its speech-to-speech AI models. The company also plans to improve software performance for edge processing chips and strengthen its deployment infrastructure across East Asian enterprise markets.

Besides that, the funding will support the company’s efforts to expand its presence in multilingual voice translation technology.

Focus on Real-Time Voice Translation

Founded by CEO Noriyuki Kojima and CTO Jungo Kasai, Kotoba Technologies develops “Koto,” a voice AI foundation model designed for real-time communication.

The platform supports text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and simultaneous speech-to-speech translation. According to the company, the model operates with latency below 50 milliseconds across Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages.

Product and Partnership Growth

Kotoba Technologies said its multilingual translation application has crossed 180,000 users. The company has also introduced an alpha version of its developer API and Python SDK.

In addition, the startup has entered smart-glass hardware integration partnerships with regional technology companies, including jig.jp.

The company continues to focus on enterprise voice AI applications across East Asia.

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