San Francisco and Tokyo-based Kotoba Technologies raises an additional $10 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with Salesforce Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund participating, to expand its Koto voice AI model optimized for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese — languages spoken by roughly 1.6 billion people.
On June 24, 2026, Kotoba Technologies announced an additional $10 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund (Sony Ventures), bringing the company's total funding to $23 million. Founded in 2023 by Cornell PhD Noriyuki Kojima (CEO) and University of Washington PhD Jungo Kasai (CTO), Kotoba has built Koto, a proprietary voice AI foundation model specifically optimized for East Asian languages — Japanese, Korean, and Chinese — a market that has been underserved by predominantly English-centric voice AI models from American and European labs.
Koto delivers speech-to-speech simultaneous translation with sub-2-second latency, alongside speech-to-text and text-to-speech models operating as low as sub-50ms latency. The models are deployable both in datacenters and on-device — smartphones, wearables, and edge chips — making them suitable for real-time conversation, AI voice agents, contact centers, and smart devices. The company's consumer app has surpassed 180,000 users and supports 21 languages, while the enterprise platform is already in production with Fortune Global 500 companies and AI-native startups.
The investor coalition signals strategic interest beyond pure financial returns. Kindred Ventures founder Steve Jang emphasized that roughly half the world's knowledge workers speak an Asian language natively, arguing Kotoba's models outperform those from Western labs for these languages. Salesforce Ventures praised the team's combination of research capability with business execution, while Sony Ventures-US's Austin Noronha described Kotoba as 'more than a translation application — a voice AI infrastructure platform,' hinting at potential integration into Sony's consumer hardware ecosystem spanning smartphones, wearables, and automotive.
The company plans to deploy the capital across three fronts: expanding speech-to-speech models for AI agents and smart devices, optimizing Koto for on-device deployment in automobiles and AI wearables including smart glasses, and building out API and SDK infrastructure for global enterprises expanding into Asian markets. The investment underscores a broader recognition that the next phase of voice AI growth will be multilingual and multi-regional by necessity — and that language-specific optimization, rather than one-size-fits-all models, may prove the winning strategy in markets beyond English.
