Smartling is an enterprise language translation company that enables customers to localize content across devices and platforms. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Smartling CEO Bryan Murphy.
Bryan Murphy’s Background
Murphy is a digital executive with over 15 years of experience building SaaS & eCommerce companies. Prior to serving as CEO of Smartling, Murphy was the VP of Vertical Markets at eBay and CEO and Co-Founder of WHI, a SaaS company acquired by eBay in 2012. Murphy has also served as CEO of Breather and as President of Digital for Serta Simmons. Additionally, Murphy serves as a director for JEGS.com, Playpower, and Madcap. He is also an advisor for Starboard Capital Partners and is a former director of Neighborly and PartsSource.
Formation Of Smartling
How did the idea for Smartling come together? “Prior to Smartling, there was not a cloud-based Translation Management solution, and companies, especially technology companies needed a solution that could integrate easily into their Tech Stacks and help them automate translation,” said Murphy. “Smartling continues to build on that innovation by adding Generative AI and Machine Translation hub Capabilities along with providing Full Service Language Services.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges did Murphy face in building the company? “We joke (a bad one) that Smartling is one of the best-kept secrets in Translation. The Value prop is so strong that as a builder of global eCommerce and software companies, I wish I’d known about Smartling many years ago!” Murphy acknowledged. “So one of our biggest challenges is to do a better job of making companies aware that there are solutions like Smartling that can help them automate translation to save them time and money and deliver guaranteed quality. “
Core Products
What are Smartling’s core products and features “Smartling’s LanguageAI platform automates the process of translation of websites, applications, and all forms of content. The core features are Translation Management, Integration to customers applications, Machine Translation Hub, and Language Services,” Murphy replied.
Evolution Of Smartling’s Technology
How has Smartling’s technology evolved since launching? “The application of AI across our entire platform has been the biggest breakthrough, resulting in significant improvements in Quality and Speed while decreasing costs dramatically,” Murphy revealed. “To be more specific, we’ve brought down our customers’ average cost per word by over 60% and improved the speed of translation by over 50% all while improving quality and brand voice significantly.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Smartling’s most significant milestones? “Recent ones would be filing a patent for Generative AI which is delivering human-level translation quality at a fraction of the cost and time, and the launch of our MT Hub, which produces up to 350% higher quality Translations by automatically selecting the best performing MT engine for your content type and language Pair,” Murphy noted.
Plus Murphy pointed out that the company’s LanguageAI platform has reduced the average cost per word by 60% for customers over the past 36 months while improving quality.
Total Address Market
What is the total addressable market (TAM) size that Smartling is pursuing? “Translation and Localization is a $30 billion market globally,” Murphy told me.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Smartling from its competition? “At Smartling, we believe in challenging the status quo for our customers,” Murphy pointed out. “We were the first to launch a cloud solution, AI-driven dynamic workflows, Translation Proxies, MT Hub, and now generative AI. The $30 billion referenced above is mostly serviced by Traditional Language Service Providers. Our LanguageAI platform is transforming the industry for the benefit of the customer by providing the quality of traditional translation at a fraction of the cost and time to deliver.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Smartling’s future company goals?“Our goal is to make it easy and ubiquitous for companies to automate the creation of multilingual applications, websites and communications,” Murphy concluded.
