ViKi, a community-powered site that allows anyone to enjoy and discover world TV and movies in their own language, launched out of beta and is announcing Series A funding of $4.3 million. The funding comes from Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Neoteny Labs, among others, and private investments from media executives, including Rajesh Sawhney, President of Reliance Entertainment of India, and Alex Zubillaga, former global head of digital at Warner Music. The capital will be used to accelerate expansion in global markets and partnerships with content providers.
The site, previously known as ViiKii, is a platform for real-time subtitling of video in over 100 languages. Translators subtitle shows into their native languages under a Creative Commons license agreement, via ViKi’s integrated and systematic platform, which includes revision history and user-generated edits.
The idea for ViKi, a play on the words video and wiki, was inspired by co-founder Jiwon Moon’s own experience with the language barriers that she dealt with as a Korean student studying education technology at Harvard Graduate School of Education. ViKi was born as a joint class project in the graduate schools of education at Harvard, and business at Stanford.
Viki currently has over 1 billion streams and 100 million words subtitled in over 143 languages, including Klingonese.