LINE is also optimistic! Voice AI startup Seasalt.ai receives $130 million investment, targeting the Southeast Asian market

Seasalt.ai, a voice AI startup from Seattle, completed a NT$13 million seed round of financing today (12). This round was led by Unlock Venture Partners from the United States, with participation from SparkLabs Taiwan, Grand Vision Ventures, PatientsForce, and Z Venture Capital (ZVC), the corporate investment department of LINE.

Seasalt.ai's core competitiveness lies in its independently developed speech recognition engine, which can naturally converse and accurately process mixed Chinese and English speech, and provide customized services for specific dialects and accents. It offers a 24-hour uninterrupted AI voice assistant service, solving pain points such as long waiting times, mechanical responses, and the inability to provide all-day service in traditional customer service.

Source: CEO Yao Xuchen (left) and CTO Chen Guoguo (right) of Seasalt.ai at the Entrepreneurial Gathering

Seasalt.ai's customers include global cloud service giant Twilio and it has become Twilio's gold partner in East Asia. It currently serves clients such as Cathay Pacific and Lion Travel, and has established partnerships with Taiwanese information technology companies such as Systex and Gogolook. Its technology has been widely applied in the fields of travel, finance, and healthcare. In the future, Seasalt.ai will continue to expand in the Taiwanese and Southeast Asian markets, targeting more large enterprise customers, and will push for Series A funding in 2025.

In the field of voice AI customer service, technology giants like Amazon and Google have already laid out, how can Seasalt.ai break through in this red sea?

Seasalt.ai sees opportunities in the blue ocean of Southeast Asia, seizing the demands of cross-border e-commerce and customer service.

Seasalt.ai was founded in 2020 and, despite the challenges posed by the epidemic, has seized the opportunity of rapid growth in cross-border e-commerce and customer service demand.

CEO Yao Xuchen and CTO Chen Guoguo are both computational linguistics PhDs from the Language and Speech Processing Center at Johns Hopkins University. The two previously founded the AI company KITT.AI, which received investments from Microsoft co-founder Paul Gardner Allen and Amazon Alexa Fund, and was later acquired by Baidu. With their rich experience and technological accumulation, they have set their sights on the huge potential of the $400 billion voice customer service market.

Image source: Entrepreneurship Gathering Seasalt.aiThe financing this time will be used to expand the Taiwan and Southeast Asian markets, with a focus on developing the SeaMeet conference assistant and SeaChat intelligent customer service system.

To solve the communication challenges in a multilingual environment, Seasalt.ai has optimized its Chinese-English mixed voice recognition capability through its self-developed voice recognition engine and can integrate multiple online customer service channels. The team's focus on developing the SeaMeet meeting assistant and SeaChat intelligent customer service system has attracted over 10,000 users.

SeaMeet, an AI meeting tool, can instantly record meeting content, identify speakers, generate meeting summaries and to-do lists, suitable for Google Meet and physical meetings, making meeting records easier. SeaChat integrates phone and text customer service, can be quickly launched within 10 minutes, and supports multilingual communication, and can be directly used on the LINE platform.

Image source: Entrepreneurship Gathering SeaChat integrates telephone and text customer service, can quickly go online within 10 minutes, and supports multilingual communication, and can be directly used on the LINE platform.

"The original intention of Seasalt.ai is to provide excellent service to customers of minor languages, especially in scenarios where frequent switching between two or three languages is needed, such as multilingual customer service and meeting management," said CEO Yao Xuchen. He pointed out that in the context where major language models often overlook the background of minor languages, the needs and pain points of customers using minor languages have become increasingly obvious, which also represents a huge market opportunity.

Image source: Entrepreneurial Gathering SeaChat integrates phone and text customer service, which can be online within 10 minutes, supports multilingual communication, and can operate directly on the LINE platform.

Investors are also optimistic about the development potential of Seasalt.ai. Hyung Kim, head of ZVC America, the investment department of LINE and Yahoo!Japan parent company, said that Seasalt.ai's technology in handling mixed-language conversations perfectly matches ZVC's mission to improve communication services in Asia, which can benefit LINE's millions of corporate users.

"Seasalt.ai can provide intelligent voice customer service experience for millions of LINE commercial users in Taiwan." Benson Lee, Director of LINE Taiwan New Business Team, believes that "Seasalt.ai incorporates large language model technology into its solution, enabling the voice assistant to not only understand user needs but also engage in intelligent conversations. It combines the advantages of LINE social media and business services, providing users with a more convenient service experience."

Image source: Entrepreneurial Gathering For Seasalt.ai, the ninth team of SparkLabs Taiwan, the co-founder and managing partner of SparkLabs Taiwan, Yen-Chi Chiu, speaks highly of it.

For SparkLabs Taiwan's ninth team Seasalt.ai, Chiu Yen-chi, co-founder and managing partner of SparkLabs Taiwan, is optimistic and has introduced ZVC investment. "Seasalt.ai not only effectively solves the pain points of multilingual communication, but also demonstrates the potential of Taiwan's software strength in the international market. Looking forward to seeing the team create more value and influence for the global market in the future."

The success of this fundraising will inject more momentum into the global expansion of Seasalt.ai. Seasalt.ai is carving out its own path in the fiercely competitive voice AI market with its unique technology and services.

This article is reprinted with permission from: "Small Gathering of Entrepreneurs"

Original title: "Cathay Pacific is a customer, LINE is also optimistic: voice AI start-up Seasalt.ai receives 130 million yuan to lock in the Southeast Asian market"

Original Author: Lai Guan Ling

LINE is also optimistic! Voice AI startup Seasalt.ai receives 130 million investment, targeting the Southeast Asian market. This article was first published in 'Crypto City'.