Singapore Language Technology Platform Bluente Raises a USD 1.5M Financing Round

Singapore-based startup Bluente has raised USD 1.5m in what it called “seed plus” financing led by Informed Ventures, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm.

Daphne Tay, Bluente’s Co-founder and CEO, told Slator that the funding round closed in July 2025 and that the company plans on using the funds to fuel expansion into high-growth regions, including APAC, the Middle East, and the United States. 

Tay added that funds will also support product development and enhancements, marketing and sales outreach, and scaling the company’s infrastructure.

Bluente was founded in 2021 by Tay and Zhi Gang Kho. Its primary offerings center around using AI to solve language and communication challenges for business professionals, and include a business language learning app, multiple courses, and an AI-powered document translation platform.

The platform is described on the Language Technology Platform’s site as being capable of translating documents in over 120 languages while preserving the original formatting of files. According to Tay, it already serves over 70 enterprise users globally and tens of thousands of individual users.

The CEO also mentioned that Bluente stood out to Informed Ventures based on this platform that “addresses a very real productivity bottleneck for global organizations.” A former Bain & Company consultant, Tay said she was “doing exactly what our clients do now: copying and pasting text from translation tools, fixing formatting, and losing hours that should have been spent on actual consulting work.”

This sentiment about manual processing, expressed on a company slide deck as “brutally hard and time consuming,” is echoed as well by Tan Li-Jie, General Manager at Bluente and formerly of WeWork where, as Counsel, he had to use law firms and traditional translation services he says were often “extremely costly and cumbersome, requiring weeks to turnaround time-sensitive documents and holding up fast-paced matters.”

Richard Lim, founder and Managing Director of Informed Ventures, stated in a press release that “We’re confident in [Bluente’s] ability to capture and grow this under-served market and look forward to supporting their expansion into new sectors and geographies.”

Looking ahead, Tay sees strong growth potential in professional services, including the legal, financial, and pharmaceutical sectors, as well as corporate teams handling multilingual documentation. She further commented that individual users also represent a growing opportunity through self-serve, pay-as-you-go plans for ad-hoc translation needs.

Beyond translation, the CEO envisions Bluente building an “advanced document processing infrastructure,” with translation serving as a first step to transform how organizations manage and collaborate on documents. “Translation is just the beginning,” commented Tay.