- AI+human translation platform company Unbabel announced it raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Point72 Ventures
AI+human translation platform company Unbabel announced it raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Point72 Ventures along with e.ventures, Greycroft, and Indico Capital Partners. Existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Notion Capital, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Samsung NEXT, Caixa Capital, Faber Ventures, FundersClub, and Structure Capital also joined the round. Including this round, Unbabel has raised a total of $91 million.
This announcement comes at a time when Unbabel reported its strongest quarter yet in terms of revenue growth and breakthroughs in machine translation technology. This round of funding — which is near 3x the $23 million the Series B round from last year — validates the business case for AI Augmentation, which is a segment Gartner is predicting to create $2.9 trillion of business value by 2021.
Unbabel combines artificial intelligence 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. Some of the company’s customers include Microsoft, Booking.com, Facebook, and easyJet — which have integrated Unbabel into their support workflows, citing cost savings up to 76% while increasing customer satisfaction.
Vasco Pedro, the co-founder and CEO of Unbabel, pointed out that the additional capital will be used to accelerate global expansion and further strengthen AI capabilities. And the company will continue refining its Quality Estimation & Post-Editing technologies as well as building out its new Pittsburgh research lab and expanding a world-class AI team.
“We are now translating over 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,” said 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,” explained Sri Chandrasekar, a 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.”
Unbabel is also rapidly expanding its footprint across the USA, Europe, and Asia. The company is also testing out video formats and chatbots for its platform.
“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.”
