Portuguese Startup Unbabel Raises $23M for its AI-Human Translation Technology
If you’ve ever gone away somewhere and not quite prepared yourself enough to know at least some of the country’s language, you’ll know how difficult it can be to just get the basics. Needing something fast and not knowing how to get it, is not nice. Thanks to Portuguese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Unbabel, that may soon be a nightmare of the past.
Unbabel, founded back in 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal, combines AI with a human touch to bring you one of the best translators out there. And now, with $23 million in funding secured, the startup is looking to develop the AI platform even further. Scale Venture Partners were leaders of the funding round while others also involved include Samsung Next, Microsoft Ventures, Funders Club, Salesforce Ventures, Caixa Capital, and Notion Capital. So far the startup's raised more than $29 million in total.
The way Unbabel works is by using AI to the bulk of the translation, then having a human editor check it over to make sure it sounds just as a human would say it and not robotic in any way. It can translate text from many different languages to English and back including French, Korean, Japanese, and Russian. It can also translate between some other countries too such as French to Spanish and Italian to German.
“We started this business with the ambition to reach the 70 percent of internet users who don’t speak English, even as a second language,” said Unbabel co-founder and Chief Executive Vasco Pedro. “But the demand for global brands to serve customers in their native language has accelerated so fast that Unbabel must now take the next step of the scale to meet it. In an Unbabel-powered internet, every business will be able to go global from day one.”
According to Andy Vitus, partner at Scale Venture Partners, what Unbabel is essentially doing is eliminating the language barrier for companies everywhere to be able to better serve international customers. “Never before have companies been able to easily integrate translation into daily workflow in a cost effective way,” he said. “This integration is setting up Unbabel to be the central hub for translation in the enterprise.”
As well as using the new funds to improve its existing AI system, the company will also us some of it to hire more staff, concentrating on both marketing and sales first.
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