AI startup Funstory.ai closes its Pre-Series A round of financing of CNY 10 million on August 8. The company saw a CNY 30 billion market as AI helps Chinese digital literature going overseas.
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As more and more companies adopt machine learning to traslate news and articles, Funstory.ai (推文科技) targets electronic literature.
AI startup Funstory.ai closes its Pre-Series A round of financing of CNY 10 million on August 8. The company consists of 23 people, with members used to work in tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Baidu, as well as translating companies such as Yiyan (译言).
AI fundamentally lowers the cost and enhances efficiency in translating electronic written contents. Compared with professional human interpreters, machines are much faster and cheaper. For a human interpreter, it normally takes one hour for a 1000-word translation task, costing 100 yuan, while the AI system only needs one second and cost 10 yuan for the same amount of work.
Although the content generated by AI is cheap and fast, the quality of writings is subject to public approval.
This area is a blue ocean. Funstory.ai targets a large number of niche markets, groups of the low-incomes who could not afford to buy pricey books. The average book price is USD 9.99, while Funstory.ai prices an online novel at USD 0.99. "We saw a market of over USD 30 billion to be created," Xiaofanzhuo citing Tong Ye, CEO of Funstory.ai.
Funstory.ai used to focus only on translating Chinese online novels. Since the beginning of 2019, the startup has attempted to deploy AI in the whole value chain of digital publishing, from translation to content distribution.
There are above 240 million online literary works, increasing about 1 million annually. But only 500 successfully goes overseas because of the language issue.
Seven of the top 10 web content companies in China have now cooperated with Funstory.ai. In the following year, Funstory.ai will work on the content copyright to build a moat and publish more than 100,000 Chinese digital books on its platform.