Cuckoo, an AI in-house interpreter for global companies, has secured its first investment after being selected for Y Combinator's W25 placement program, a Silicon Valley-based accelerator. This achievement comes just six months after its launch in July 2024.
Cuckoo is a corporate interpretation service that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs). It learns corporate documents and keywords, such as presentation materials and meeting notes, in real time, accurately interpreting even specialized content in over 20 languages. It can be accessed through the website without any additional setup, providing an experience similar to having an in-house interpreter right by your side, anytime, anywhere in the world, whether for overseas business trips, online meetings, or offline events.
Currently, global companies such as Snowflake, PagerDuty, and Weights & Biases, as well as domestic companies and institutions such as SeAH Besteel and Seoul Global Center, are using Cuckoo, helping them enter new countries or strengthen their position in overseas markets.
Y Combinator, a leading startup accelerator, leverages its 20-year track record and global network to produce innovative companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Twitch, and Sendbird. Each batch boasts a highly competitive rate, with over 20,000 startups from around the world applying. Among startups founded by Korean entrepreneurs, Cuckoo was selected for this batch.
With Y Combinator's support, Cuckoo plans to secure more global corporate clients and enhance its capabilities to help companies localize beyond interpretation.
"Language barriers are still a challenge even for large corporations," said Cuckoo co-founders Kim Geon-woo and Lee Yong-hee. "We will use Cuckoo to help more companies expand their businesses globally and grow into global enterprises." They expressed their ambition to create a B2B product that goes beyond interpretation and localization and defines the language category.
Meanwhile, the two co-founders first met at KAIST's academic club ICISTS and developed a passion for creating global service startups based on their experiences in the Korean startup ecosystem.
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