Fresh off its latest funding round, a pre-Series A that raked in USD 2.3m, legal AI translation startup Bering Lab is looking to expand its reach, both geographically and in terms of expertise.
South Korea-headquartered Bering Lab’s pre-Series A is a bit of an outlier in that the company was founded in 2020, and has already seen several successful seed rounds for undisclosed amounts. These include an October 2020 investment from the TIPS program, a tech startup incubator, and a November 2020 seed round led by Korean search giant Naver.
In November 2023, Bering Lab became the first South Korean startup to win the grand prize from the Huawei Cloud Startup Ignite Competition. The award came with USD 0.125m “Cloud Credits;” introductions to three or four VCs, and “fundraising support.”
Also in November 2023, the company won the investment prize from an annual pitch competition held by The MBA Fund, founded and managed by a group of alumni of Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Bering Lab, which Slator featured in the 2023 Edition of the AI 50 Under 50 List, can be classified as an “AI agency,” founded on an AI-first approach (as opposed to a traditional language services provider that pivoted to AI).
As a matter of fact, Bering Lab actually provides a number of LSPs with machine translation (MT) and post-editing.
The company has focused since its founding on specific sectors; namely, legal, financial, and IP content. Co-CEO Jae Yoon Kim told Slator that Bering Lab’s “laser focus” on legal translation “gives us confidence that we can be the winners in this space.”
The success of this strategy might be reflected in the company’s (self-reported) 2023 revenues of USD 2.3m — up 11.1% from USD 2.1m in 2022.
It could also explain investors’ interest in Bering Lab. Kim explained, “We first met SBVA [fka SoftBank Ventures] at a startup event last year even before we started fundraising for this round. The round was oversubscribed, but we went with SBVA because of their history in investing in the translation and localization space (e.g., Iyuno), and their global footprint.”
The Right Place at the Right Time
According to Kim, Bering Lab has been essentially bootstrapped since its small 2020 seed round, after which “there was not a pressing need to do another raise.” The motivation for the pre-Series A, then, was an interest in speeding up both product and market development.
Bering Lab currently employs 25 full-time staff, representing a mix of NLP researchers, product developers, and PMs. The company also engages a translator pool of “over 500 lawyer-linguists.” Kim said funds will be put toward “further key strategic hires” to benefit research, product, and operations.
“We are also looking into smaller acquisition targets to expand into new domains and/or regions,” Kim added. “Geographical expansion, starting with Asia and eventually to the US and Europe, is a critical part of the company’s growth plans.”
Slator 2023 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report
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Bering Lab serves more than 300 clients across major law firms, patent firms, and corporate legal departments spread across 15 countries, and 20% of Bering Lab’s revenues currently come from international clients. The agency aims to increase that proportion to 50% within the next three years.
A lot of new business comes from referrals from existing clients, Kim said, and Bering Lab has seen an increased emphasis on efficiency and speed — two major selling points for AI-enabled services — and a growing interest in automating specific parts of workflows.
While Kim named DeepL “the obvious competitor” within the MT space, he also noted that a client’s “status quo” for translation — whether an existing translation vendor or an internal solution — is often the biggest barrier to adoption.
But exposure to GenAI tools has helped customers quickly realize “that there is no one-size-fits-all solution or one model to rule them all,” Kim said. “We believe there will be different winners in each vertical and each use case, which makes the space more dynamic with more competition.”
