Translation Platform Smartcat announced today (September 10) The company announced it has secured $43 million in a recent funding round led by Left Lane Capital.
Founded in 2016, the company offers an all-in-one platform for translation services, providing AI translation, human translation and a combination of both in hundreds of languages.
What is Smartcat and what does the investment do?
Smartcat’s services include translating written and spoken content in over 200 languages. Rather than training AI models itself, it matches third-party software that is best suited to specific content and language.
The Boston-based company claims to have 1,000 customers, including 20% of the Fortune 500. One of its newest features is AI-powered video translation and dubbing, which allows content to be translated quickly.
“I founded SmartCat to disrupt the traditional translation agency model, which is time-consuming, manual, and based on long supply chains and human services,” said CEO Ivan Smolnikov. He told TechCrunch.
The latest funding round more than doubled SmartCat’s funding to $70 million, which Smolnikov said will be used to hire more people to its 200-person team, develop new products, and fund marketing.
“As an early entrant to the market, SmartCat has a broad portfolio of customers and is uniquely positioned to continue to grow its depth and quality of product offerings and secure a competitive advantage over the long term,” Vinny Puji, managing partner at investor Left Lane Capital, said in a statement.
Predictions for the success of the AI translation industry are promising: Grand View Research projects that the global market size will be $978.2 million in 2022, and could expand at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5% between 2023 and 2030.
But Smolnikov argues that Smartcat’s main competitors remain traditional translation companies, not other AI services.
“Traditionally, companies have relied on outsourcing to agencies,” he said. “Insourcing was a different approach, but doing it manually had scalability issues…SmartCat’s focus on language AI quality offers practical [alternative].”
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