With the help of the Israeli startup, real-time transcription, user-friendly interface customization, and text display customization are all made possible. An $11 million Series A fundraising round has been raised by the Israeli startup Nagish, which uses artificial intelligence to allow the deaf to communicate over the phone. Canaan Partners spearheaded the funding effort, including participation from the creators of Looker and Datadog as well as current investors K5 Global, Tokyo Black, Cardumen Capital, Vertex Ventures Israel, Contour Venture Partners, and Precursor Ventures.
The business has raised $16 million thus far. With this support, Nagish—which translates to “accessible” in Hebrew—will be able to carry on creating communication solutions that will improve the sharing of knowledge, communication, and working capacities of more than a billion hard-of-hearing and deaf individuals globally.
Until recently, those with hearing or speech impairments who wanted to speak on the phone had to contact a company that offered telephone relay services. Representatives from the center would then join the call and help convert voice to text and vice versa. Nagish developed a private relay service that removes the requirement for a human intermediary in phone conversations between deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Real-time transcription, user-friendly interface customization, and text display customization are all made possible by this technology.
“At Nagish, we are aware of the disruption produced by generative artificial intelligence that turns simultaneous transcription and translation into basic products available to everyone, but we are not afraid of it. Today, it may seem like that’s all we do, but in practice, we are an accessibility company, and our solutions are much broader, with transcription being only a part of it,” explains Tomer Aharoni, the company’s CEO.
Amazon is one of Nagish’s clients, and the American behemoth Comcast already uses its software in its communication solutions. According to Aharoni, a large number of workers in Amazon’s logistics hubs are deaf and require assistive technology in order to communicate with one another. He further notes that Nagish, along with five seasoned businesses that employ human translators, was just added to the list of providers approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States to offer automatic simultaneous translation services.
After this integration, the Israeli business will be compensated for each minute that a call is placed via its app. Since simultaneous translators for the deaf, also known as sign language interpreters, only spend a few hours a day and are paid $75 per hour, Aharoni estimates that the U.S. alone represents a $2 billion market. As a result, hiring two sign language interpreters concurrently to hire a deaf person is frequently necessary, making employment unprofitable in most situations.
