Unbabel is an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

-powered human translation platform. The company has headquarters in Lisbon,

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, In recognized minority languages of Portugal: :* mwl, República Pertuesa is a country located on the Iberian Peninsula, in Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Macaronesian ...

, and

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

. Unbabel combines

Neural Machine Translation Neural machine translation (NMT) is an approach to machine translation that uses an artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically modeling entire sentences in a single integrated model. Properties They requi ...

with

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and a

crowdsourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

model to differentiate itself from other translation service providers. The name Unbabel is derived from the biblical story of Babel. The company is focused on the translation of

customer service Customer service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services. Each industry requires different levels of customer service, but in the end, the idea of a well-performed service is that ...

communications.

History

Unbabel was founded in August 2013 by Vasco Pedro, João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, Bruno Silva, and Hugo Silva and was incubated by

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

in late 2014. The company was officially launched in March 2014. In May 2014, Unbabel raised a $1.5 million Seed round to support the growth and development of its translation platform, receiving investment from prominent

venture capital firm Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

s and

business angel An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

s including

Google Ventures GV is a venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc., founded by Bill Maris, that provides seed, venture, and growth stage funding to technology companies. Founded as Google Ventures in 2009, the firm has operated independently of Google, Alph ...

Matrix Partners Matrix Partners is a US-based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconducto ...

, Caixa Capital, Faber Ventures,

IDG Ventures IDG Ventures is a global family of venture funds with approximately $3.6 billion under management. All of the funds were originally sole-source-funded by International Data Group. The first fund was created by IDG in 1996 and was located in ...

, Digital Garage, Shilling Capital Partners,

Wefunder Wefunder is a crowdfunding service which connects startups with investors online. Wefunder uses a provision in the 2012 JOBS Act which allows unaccredited investors to purchase equity in early stage private companies. Foundation Wefunder was ...

, FundersClub, Elad Gil and Raymond Tonsing. In early 2015, Unbabel was recognized as one of

’s fastest growing Seed stage companies. In late 2016, Unbabel raised $5 million from lead investors Notion Capital and Caixa Capital. In early 2018, Unbabel raised $23 million in Series B funding, led by

Scale Venture Partners Scale Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm that typically leads Series A or Series B rounds. Over the last 20 years, Scale has made over 380 investments in Cloud, SaaS and Infrastructure companies, with over 159 exits, inclu ...

and Notion Capital, bringing its total venture capital funding to $31.2 million. The company is privately held. On September 24 2019, Unbabel raised $60 million in Series C funding to further refine its AI+human translation platform. The latest funding round was led by Point72 Ventures with participation from e.ventures, Greycroft, Indico Capital Partners and existing investors, bringing its total funding to $91 million.

In The U.S.

In August 2019 Unbabel opened a research lab in Pittsburgh, PA. The lab is led by U.S. researcher Alon Lavie. Its customers include

easyJet EasyJet plc (styled as easyJet) is a British multinational low-cost airline group headquartered at London Luton Airport. It operates domestic and international scheduled services on 927 routes in more than 34 countries via its affiliate airli ...

Booking.com Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam, is one of the largest online travel agencies. It is a subsidiary of Booking Holdings. History In 1996, Geert-Jan Bruinsma, a student at Universiteit Twente, founded Bookings.nl. In 2000, Booking.com ...

Rovio Entertainment Rovio Entertainment Oyj (formerly Relude Oy and Rovio Mobile Oy and doing business internationally as the Rovio Entertainment Corporation) is a Finnish video game developer based in Espoo. Founded in 2003 by Helsinki University of Technology ...

Under Armour Under Armour, Inc. is an American sports equipment company that manufactures footwear, sports and casual apparel. Under Armour's global headquarters are located in Baltimore, Maryland, with additional offices located in Amsterdam (European head ...

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboa ...

, and

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

References

External links

*{{Official website Translation companies Online marketplaces of Portugal Online marketplaces of the United States Privately held companies of the United States Freelance marketplace websites Y Combinator companies Technology companies established in 2013