Listed firms in countries where English is not the primary language must comply with financial disclosure rules and ensure that all investor documents are available in English to attract investors from across the world. By integrating its AI technology with human translators, WritePath makes the process quicker and more scalable. Customers of the Taipei-based firm include electronics giant Foxconn, computer maker ASUS, airline China Airlines, the Taiwan Stock Exchange, and mobile phone maker Taiwan Mobile.

Quantum International Corp. CEO Alex Lee spearheaded the $340,000 pre-Series A investment that WritePath has announced. Angel investors such as jobstreet.com founder Mark Chang also participated in the round. ByUDN.com, a division of United Daily, the largest media organisation in Taiwan, and Elite Asia, a translation company based in Singapore, are two of WritePath’s former investors.

WritePath was initially featured, when it was still primarily an essay editing service for students applying to universities, professional writers, and academic researchers. Essay editing was labour consuming and hard to scale, according to CEO and founder Charles Chen, so the firm made the decision to shift its emphasis. Before its team realised that governments in Asia are enacting more English-language disclosure regulations, especially for public firms, WritePath supplied B2C translation services.

Warren, the business’s own machine translation engine, works in tandem with human translators on the platform the company has developed. In order to train Warren, we used a linguistic dataset consisting of several million Chinese-to-English phrases taken from financial, annual, and ESG reports.

Investor activism and the European Union’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) are two factors driving the need for new disclosure practises. The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) is a piece of legislation that mandates increased disclosure from businesses for the sake of protecting investors. One provision of its trading regulations mandated that brokers collect revenue for research independently of trading commissions. Instead of relying just on equities research reports, several funds have begun to seek for data from the IR and ESG divisions of listed firms.

Yet, Chen warns that “as a result, small and mid-cap enterprises may find themselves easily disregarded.” They get a lift and can make sure they don’t slip off the investor radar if their data is presented properly in English. As the development of capital markets continues in Asia, he said that more corporations in the region’s markets, including Taiwan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asian nations, would begin posting disclosures in English.

Many of WritePath’s customers previously employed the services of either traditional translation agencies or the translation divisions of the Big Four accounting firms in order to generate reports in English. According to Chen, one of WritePath’s benefits is that its technology, which includes the corpora management system T-Booster and the word-synonymizer Warren, ensures that the language and terminology used inside an organisation is consistent. This frees up the company’s human translators to concentrate on examining sentences for accuracy rather than quantity.

For time-sensitive, crucial updates, WritePath additionally provides a “self-service” option. Clients may now use WritePath’s platform to place and track orders for translation services. A portion of the extra money will be utilised to improve the portal’s capacity to handle simultaneous delivery of numerous files and batches that arrive at different times.

According to Chen, WritePath sets itself apart from other financial printers like Toppan Merrill, R.R. Donnelly, and Pronexus by integrating human translators with AI technology. Although EQS and MZ are available online, they cannot publish in countries where the primary language is not English without the assistance of a translation service. Fiscalnote is another player in the financial disclosure area, but unlike many of its competitors, it concentrates on data, such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) statistics, rather than translation.