• Gengo

  Participated · Series B · Apr 2013

  Gengo operates a global crowdsourced translation platform that connects translators with customers and has most of its revenue coming from overseas despite being Tokyo-based. The company has processed over 300 million pieces of translated content and last year opened a data portal showing platform metrics. Management plans to use new funding to hire in the U.S. and Japan, boost sales and marketing, and develop more powerful translation tools to crack international markets and expand in Japan. Investors see growth opportunities in Japan ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Leadership has shifted: Matthew Romaine, previously CTO, became CEO and has led the new round while co‑founder Robert Laing moved to a "Special Projects" role. Financially, Gengo recently closed a $5.4M Series C and has raised over $23M to date. Gengo operates an online translation platform that taps a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide translations in 33 languages. The company’s platform serves high volumes from video, travel, e-commerce and community portals, and it is an integrated paid translation service for YouTube. Japan and the U.S. each account for about 40% of Gengo’s revenue. Gengo has been growing rapidly—its translators translated more text in 2013 than in 2012—and the team reported notable partnerships, including Google’s YouTube and 3Play Media. The company maintains a staff of about 30 in Tokyo and nine in San Mateo. Management says the new funding will be used to accelerate global expansion, improve the translation platform, and increase translation speed. myGengo operates a human-only translation service (no machine translation) and offers an API for website and app owners to access a network of over 3,000 native translators. The company charges from US$0.05 per word and has translated more than 15 million words to date. myGengo expanded from nine to 15 languages in a year and says revenue has grown 1,000%, with more content translated in Q1 2011 than in its entire prior history. CEO Robert Laing reports 63% of revenue comes from high-volume media, ecommerce and travel via the API, 17% from app localization, and the remainder from SMB and individual customers. myGengo’s customer roster includes VW, Audi, Evernote, Pulse, and Greplin. The company plans to use new capital to bolster sales, marketing, and engineering, expand its API business, and grow its global native translator network. MyGengo operates a translation platform that supplements automated techniques with a network of over 2,500 translators across time zones. It provides an API and Rails, WordPress and Django plugins, translating thousands of texts daily in 14 languages. The service translated over 5 million words in the first three months of 2011, more than in the prior two years combined. Customers include ShapeUp, Evernote, YouVersion and Producteev. MyGengo competes with Smartling, One Hour Translation and Speaklike but differentiates with a lower price point (about 25% below One Hour Translation) and developer integrations. CEO Robert Laing has said the company aims to "own" translation within major B2B2C channels, indicating a focus on enabling merchants and publishers to sell and communicate across borders. The company recently hired Kenji Yamamoto as Chief Revenue Officer and Jeff Binstock as Chief Operating Officer and has secured seed financing to support growth. myGengo provides crowdsourced human translations in nine languages, using certified translators to handle texts from short sentences to long documents entirely over the web. The service claims prices up to 70% cheaper than professional translators and launched an API in April to let developers plug on-demand human translation into websites, apps, widgets and social networks. Since the April API launch, the volume of words translated per month grew five-fold and monthly revenue grew by the same factor. The company plans to use the seed funding to expand its multi-lingual site tool “String,” build API plugins for popular frameworks, and establish a US enterprise sales operation. myGengo is based in Tokyo and has attracted a diverse, international investor base.

No current team members are available.