Unbabel, the AI+human translation platform, announced it has raised $60 million in Series C financing led by Point72 Ventures, along with e.ventures, Greycroft, and Indico Capital Partners, bringing its total funding to $91 million.
Previous investors Scale Venture Partners, Notion Capital, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Samsung NEXT, Caixa Capital, Faber Ventures, FundersClub, and Structure Capital also participated in the round.
The announcement comes in the wake of the company’s strongest quarter yet, both in terms of revenue growth and breakthroughs in machine translation technology.
The latest funding — nearly three times the $23 million Series B raised in 2018 — speaks to the rapidly expanding business case for AI Augmentation, a segment which Gartner predicts to create $2.9 trillion of business value by 2021.
Unbabel combines state-of-the-art AI with a global community of translators to enable companies to offer multilingual customer service, no matter where they are based or what language their agents speak. Major brands such as Microsoft, Booking.com, Facebook, and easyJet have integrated Unbabel into their support workflows, citing cost savings of up to 76%, while increasing customer satisfaction.
Unbabel co-founder and CEO Vasco Pedro says that the additional capital will be used to accelerate global expansion and further strengthen AI capabilities. The company will continue to refine its award-winning Quality Estimation & Post-Editing technologies, as well as build out its new Pittsburgh research lab, expanding a world-class AI team.
“We are now translating more than 1,000,000 customer service messages a month. That’s over five times the volume we saw in 2018, which underscores the global demand for agile multilingual customer service,” says Pedro. “Now, we have the opportunity to develop the next generation of the ‘Translation-as-a-Service’ (TaaS) platform that will power enterprise communications of the future and ultimately become the world’s translation layer.”
“We were inspired by Unbabel’s vision to provide enterprise-grade translations at the click of a button and impressed with the human-in-the-loop translation technology they’ve built,” said Sri Chandrasekar, Partner at Point72 Ventures. “We believe that Unbabel is poised to transform the translation industry, and we are incredibly excited to partner with them on this journey.”
Pedro concluded: “We are pleased to add the support of Point72 Ventures, e.ventures, Greycroft, and Indico Capital Partners, who understand the disruptive power of truly seamless translation. For the first time, Unbabel’s customers are able to look at language as a business enabler rather than as a barrier, and scale their operations according to strategic priorities.”
Committed to the vision of building universal understanding, Unbabel is rapidly expanding its footprint across the USA, Europe, and Asia.
Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.