What do you get when you mix an Iranian born-and-educated CEO, two college dropouts, a stint in China, a short-lived consumer business and the Irish startup visa program? A natural-language processing startup called Aylien, naturally. Although, jokes aside, it might represent something much larger than the company’s business acumen if Aylien is able to succeed in this field.

Aylien, which launched in 2010 as a consumer business with a product called Talk.ee (“basically, a better Reddit,” founder and CEO Parsa Ghafarri said), pivoted in late February into the business-to-business world with a collection of API services that expose its text-analysis capabilities to interested developers. “[We] realized that maybe we are not a consumer team by nature,” Ghafarri said. “It’s like going to the gym because the cool guys are doing it.”

Among the new products is a text-analysis API that performs tasks such as classification, entity and concept extraction, language…