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On the 7th, ElevTalk, a U.S.-based startup headquartered in Silicon Valley that develops multilingual voice interfaces for workplace professionals, announced it has secured pre-seed funding.
The investment round included Patriot Fund and Xiaoxiao Fund, jointly operated by Base Ventures and EO Studio, as well as an angel investor who was a founding member of Baidu.
Patriot Fund is a 50 billion won fund that invests in ultra-early-stage startups that establish U.S. entities from the outset to challenge global markets. Established last January, it focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and consumer goods.
ElevTalk is a service that converts spoken content into text with a single tap across any app. Speech is transcribed and refined in real time into ready-to-send messages, and with one-touch translation, users can speak their native language and have it delivered in English.
Its key differentiator lies in its target user base. Unlike existing dictation tools aimed at native English speakers, ElevTalk focuses on original-language transcription for Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and English, as well as handling code-switching (language mixing).
An ElevTalk representative explained, "We also strengthened recognition of intonation, personal names, and technical terminology. Our goal is to understand any accent from the very beginning."
In its own benchmark tests, ElevTalk achieved a Chinese Character Error Rate (CER) of 1.55% for Korean and 2.25% for Chinese. This represents approximately 24% lower error rates for Korean and 43% lower for Chinese compared to global tools such as Wispr Flow and Typeless.
Since launch, the company has acquired over 1,000 early users without any marketing expenses. The core user base consists of multilingual communicators—Korean-Chinese entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley—who are quick to adopt new AI tools.
User engagement is also high. Core users engage at least five days a week, with the most active users inputting up to 4,000 words via voice daily. The weekly active user re-visit rate for the following week has risen from 17% to nearly 50%.
ElevTalk was co-founded by CEO George Dai and CTO Bob Fu. Both are graduates of Beijing University's Department of Mathematics, having declined internal incubation offers from major Chinese corporations to pursue entrepreneurship.
CEO George Dai is a Schwarzman Scholar from Tsinghua University who worked at McKinsey before leading strategy roles at China's largest AI voice company. CTO Bob Fu was an early member of a Chinese AI startup, where he spent seven years training low-latency multimodal AI models and helped build products used by over one million people.
Based on this investment, ElevTalk will accelerate efforts to target Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese workplace communities in the United States. The company also plans to continuously strengthen its service capabilities for Asian languages and accents.
CEO George Dai noted, "While voice is becoming the first interface of the AI era, general-purpose dictation products have focused solely on native English speakers, leaving multilingual professionals in Asia marginalized."
He added, "There are over 80 million non-native English-speaking professionals working in English environments worldwide, with a significant portion based in Silicon Valley. We aim to deliver immediately transmittable results regardless of language or mixing patterns."
CTO Bob Fu stated, "Voice recognition for Asian languages, intent understanding across language boundaries, and low latency constitute our entire technical roadmap. Real-world feedback on accents and corrections from actual work creates a virtuous cycle that general-purpose players struggle to replicate."
Yang Hyung-jun, Partner at Base Ventures, and Kim Tae-yong, CEO of EO, who led the investment round, remarked, "Voice keyboards are the fastest-growing interface, yet despite over half of Silicon Valley workers being non-native English speakers, no general-purpose product has been built for them."
They further expressed, "We expect ElevTalk's team to evolve into a business OS for the voice era. Korea, where willingness to pay for improved English communication is highest globally, will be a key milestone on this journey."
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