In countries where English is not the dominant language, listed companies not only have to deal with financial disclosure requirements, but also ensure that their investor materials are available in English to global constituencies. write path It makes the process faster and scalable by combining its AI technology with human translation. The Taipei-based startup’s clients include Foxconn, Asus, China Airlines, Taiwan Stock Exchange and Taiwan Mobile.
WritePath announced that it has raised $340,000 in pre-Series A funding led by Quantum International Corp. CEO Alex Lee. Angel investors including jobstreet.com founder Mark Chang also participated in the round. WritePath’s previous investors include byUDN.com, a subsidiary of United Daily News, one of Taiwan’s largest media organizations, and Elite Asia, a Singapore-based translation company.
technology crisis WritePath was first covered back in 2014 At the time it was a dissertation editing service for college applicants, technical writers and academic researchers. Founder and CEO Charles Chen said the company decided to shift focus because editing papers was labor-intensive and had to acquire new clients every year, making it difficult to scale. Initially providing B2C translation services, WritePath’s team discovered that Asian governments were enforcing more English-language disclosure policies, including for public companies.
The company’s platform combines technologies such as its in-house machine translation engine Warren with human translation. Warren was trained on a corpus of millions of Chinese and English sentences collected from financial, annual and ESG reports.
The WritePath team
One of the reasons for the new disclosure policy is investor activism and the adoption of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) in the European Union. MiFID II is a legislative framework that requires companies to increase transparency, including regulatory reporting, to protect investors. Its trading rules include requiring brokers to charge research funding separate from trading fees. Many funds began to seek information from the IR and ESG departments of listed companiesrather than relying on equity research reports.
“However, as a result, small and medium-sized companies may find themselves easily overlooked,” Chen said. “Therefore, presenting their information professionally in English helps to enhance their strength and ensure that they do not fall off the investment radar.” He added that as the capital market matures and develops, including Taiwan, China, South Korea and Companies in more Asian markets, including Southeast Asian countries, will begin publishing disclosures in English.
Before turning to WritePath, many of its clients used traditional translation agencies or translation services from Big Four accounting firms to produce reports in English. Chen says one of WritePath’s strengths is that its technology, including Warren and the corpus management system T-Booster, keeps the company’s language and terminology consistent. That means its human translators can focus on the quality of the content, checking sentences for accuracy.
WritePath also offers a “self-service” solution for material information that needs to be disclosed within 24 hours. This enables clients to order and manage translations through WritePath’s portal. Some of its new funding will be used to upgrade the portal so that it can handle multiple files and batches that come in at different times but need to be delivered immediately.
What sets WritePath apart from financial printers such as Toppan Merrill, RR Donnelly and Pronexus is that it combines human translation with artificial intelligence technology in its workflow, Chen said. EQS and MZ are online IR disclosure tools, but translation assistance is required when publishing information in non-English-speaking countries. Another company in the financial disclosure space is Fiscalnote, but it focuses on data such as ESG information rather than translation.
The funding will be used to expand WritePath’s translation services for public companies and add more verticals, such as the design and layout of ESG reports.
