Unbabel offers AI-supported translation services and operates a LangOps platform that combines machine translation with human language experts. Founded in Lisbon in 2013 by Vasco Pedro (CEO), the company has expanded internationally with offices in Portugal, the United States (San Francisco), the United Kingdom, Romania, the Philippines, Germany, Bulgaria and Israel. Its recent strategy includes acquisitions—last year it bought German EVS Translations and Israeli Bablic—to bolster capabilities and global reach. The company calls itself a scaleup and emphasizes making organizations operate in multiple languages simultaneously. Unbabel is focused on growing its LangOps platform and pursuing further international expansion while strengthening its path to profitability. The firm says the new capital will support global growth, acquisitions and efforts to scale toward profitability. Unbabel offers a translation-as-a-service platform that combines machine translation speed with human-in-the-loop edits from a global community of translators. The company says it has more than 100k registered translators and 200+ full-time employees, and serves over 150 enterprise customers including Facebook, Microsoft, Booking.com and easyJet. It processes more than 1,000,000 customer service messages per month, a fivefold increase since 2018, and touts cost savings and improved customer satisfaction for clients. Unbabel reports its strongest quarter yet in revenue growth, though it is not disclosing figures. The firm is investing in AI improvements and has announced an AI research lab in Pittsburgh. Planned use of new funding includes ramping up growth in the US, Europe and Asia and enhancing its AI capabilities. Unbabel offers a proprietary platform that combines natural language processing, neural machine translation, quality-estimation algorithms and a global network of 55,000 translators to deliver AI-powered human translations at scale. The company exposes APIs and dedicated integrations (Salesforce, Zendesk, WordPress, Mailchimp and others) to plug into customers' content-creation, translation and communication workflows. Customers named in the article include Booking.com, Pinterest, Trello, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Evernote and many other large online and consumer brands. Led by CEO and co-founder Vasco Pedro, Unbabel graduated from Y Combinator’s 2014 Winter Batch. The company announced it raised $23M in new funding and said it will use the proceeds for international expansion and further product development. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article. Unbabel’s core product is the Unbabel Language Engine, a Translation-as-a-Service platform that blends machine translation with crowdsourced human post‑editing. The platform combines natural language processing, artificial intelligence and quality-estimation algorithms with a global network of 40,000 human post‑editors. Unbabel targets conversational content such as email and chat and offers APIs plus dedicated integrations for Zendesk and Salesforce to enable multilingual customer support. The company cites early customer traction with Pinterest, Microsoft and Skyscanner and is a graduate of Y Combinator’s 2014 Winter Batch. Unbabel plans to use recent funding to build out and scale the Unbabel Language Engine and to further reduce the cost of human translation. The company was founded in August 2013 and has offices in Lisbon and San Francisco. Unbabel pairs automated machine translation with human editors who refine output to deliver faster, affordable translations. Customers send content via email, online order or the Unbabel API; the content is automatically translated and then refined by two human editors before being returned. The company charges $0.02 per word (with bulk discounts) and reports about 160 paying customers. Four months after launching, Unbabel was growing roughly 15% a week in sales and 12% a week in the number of editors on its platform. Editors earn $8 and anyone proficient in two or more languages can become an editor; the company is rolling out Marvin, an automated feedback tool to help editors improve and become paid. Unbabel also launched a beta Zendesk plugin to enable customer-service reps to support customers in any language. The company says the new funding will be used to expand engineering and marketing to grow its customer base and meet demand.

Total raised

$111M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Dec 2023