Smartcat Raises $43M for AI-Powered Translation Platform

Smartcat secures $43M for its AI-powered translation platform | TechCrunch

Can AI ever fully replace translators? Not likely. AI translations tend to lack the lexical richness of their human-translated counterparts, mainly because AI models make choices based on probability -- not lived experience. Certainly, AI can produce "accurate" translations, but the translations lack the spice of life, like a textbook version of the source text. For many companies, accuracy is all that's required, making the AI translation sector an attractive one. Smartcat, founded in 2016, is among the vendors providing automated translation tools geared toward enterprises, and its co-founder and CEO, Ivan Smolnikov, says business is good. "We have over 1,000 corporate customers, including 20% of the Fortune 500," he told TechCrunch. "While most of Smartcat's clients are large global enterprises, we also count many local and international government entities among them." Before founding Smartcat, Smolnikov was a physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he researched fiber optics materials. After two years in the lab, Smolnikov decided to try his hand at entrepreneurship, founding the language services company ABBYY LS. It's at ABBYY where Smolnikov incubated Smartcat, in fact, which spun out as an independent entity in 2016. Smolnikov left ABBYY, where he was a board member at the time, the same year. "I founded Smartcat to reinvent the traditional translation agency model, which is based on a time-consuming, manually-operated, long supply chain, built on human services," Smolnikov said. "Our AI platform supports a wide range of use cases for enterprise customers dealing with multilingual content." At a high level, Boston-based Smartcat offers tools, apps and managed services to help companies translate written and spoken content -- think e-learning courses, websites, files and software -- into around 280 languages. Smartcat doesn't necessarily train AI translation models itself, but rather runs content through a "matching engine" the determines which third-party model might be appropriate for the content and target output language. Smartcat says it does fine-tune translation models -- including in-house models customers themselves have trained -- where there it makes sense, like in cases where a company has a large database of commonly-translated phrases they want a model to "memorize." In an acknowledgement that AI makes mistakes sometimes, Smartcat also provides access to a network of translators and copy editors who can assist with review for a fee. "Customers can choose different translation options, such as AI translation, human translation or a combination -- automatic translation with professional editing," Smolnikov explained. As of a few years ago, some translators on Reddit suggested that Smartcat had a problem with dishonest -- and non-paying -- clients. Smolnikov assured me this has been cleared up, though, and that translators can charge whatever they wish minus Smartcat's 2% to 8% per-payment fee. (The exact fee depends on the volume of jobs processed and the customer's and translators' countries of residence.) While there's a plentiful supply of companies selling AI translation services, including human-aided ones (see: EasyTranslate, D-ID, DeepL, Lilt, Lengoo, etc.), Smolnikov sees Smartcat primarily competing with old-school translation agencies and in-house orgs. "Traditionally, enterprises relied on outsourcing to agencies," he said. "Insourcing was another approach, but when done manually, it struggled with scalability ... Smartcat's focus on language AI quality provides a practical [alternative]." Investors seem to be in agreement. Smartcat on Tuesday announced that it raised $43 million in a Series C funding round led by Left Lane Capital with participation from Lead Edge Capital. This brings the company's total raised to $70 million; Smolnikov says that the new cash will be put toward expanding its 200-person team, product development and various ongoing marketing and sales efforts. Vinny Pujji, managing partner at Left Lane Capital, had this to say in a canned statement: "As an early market mover, Smartcat has a broad portfolio of customers and is uniquely positioned to compound the depth and quality of their product offering, continuing to lock in competitive advantages over time." Those "advantages" could translate (no pun intended) into a substantial payday, should the rosiest projections about the AI translation sector come true. According to Grand View Research, the global market for machine translation solutions -- which was worth $978.2 million in 2022 -- could grow at a 13.5% compound annual growth rate from from 2023 to 2030.

Enterprise-focused AI translation platform and marketplace operator Smartcat raises $43M in funding - SiliconANGLE

Enterprise-focused AI translation platform and marketplace operator Smartcat raises $43M in funding Enterprise language translation company Smartcat Platform Inc. said today it has closed on a $43 million funding round to fuel its expansion. The Series C round was led by Left Lane Capital and saw participation from Lead Edge Capital. Smartcat is the creator of what it says is a simple, intuitive platform that uses artificial intelligence to automatically translate and create content for global businesses. It can translate and create new content in almost any major language, while realizing significant cost savings compared with traditional tools. The company's AI-generated translations work with almost any kind of content, including emails, blog posts, websites, e-commerce listings, videos, audio files, marketing materials, software documentation and accounting documents. The company claims that the quality of its translations are topnotch, with near humanlike quality, but what really sets it apart from rival offerings is that it also provides a marketplace for business-to-business translation services. By using AI matching algorithms, Smartcat can connect all kinds of clients, including businesses that require translation services, with specialist translation agencies and freelance translators. Its marketplace also features a network of more than 500,000 professional human content editors, to help companies that need to review translate content, whether it's done by a machine or a human. The startup also provides various software to help customers automate their translation routines, including workflow management and collaboration tools, translation review, pricing automation, payment infrastructure and so on. In addition, its smart engine makes it simple for organizations to reuse previously translated content whenever one of their employees begins a new task, helping to slash their translation budget by up to 80%. Smartcat therefore claims to be unique in that it brings value to every translation market stakeholder, including enterprises and service providers, while providing tools to simplify the way they collaborate with one another. Its platform handles all of their communications and workflows. In addition, the platform offers automation tools through its application programming interface, so various workflows can be automated. For example, if a company has a need to regularly translate social media posts from English into Chinese, this process can be automated so every time there is some new content, it's automatically translated by a machine before being sent to the company's regular editor for proofing. Smartcat reckons its novel combination of AI- and human-powered content translation and workflow automation tools enables some of its clients to create as much as 10 times more content on their existing translation budgets, and they can do so in a small fraction of the time it used to take them. As such, those customers see significant improvements in terms of sales, marketing and learning and development. Smartcat founder and Chief Executive Ivan Smolnikov said his company was able to entice its new investors because of its reputation for being extremely innovative in terms of AI translation and content generation. "This new funding recognizes our success to date and will help accelerate our current and future AI offerings for global teams," he added. In addition to today's funding, Smartcat announced the recent release of a new, full-cycle multilingual AI video translation and dubbing service that's already being used by more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including 20% of the Fortune 500. And today, it's launching a new offering that automates the creation and translation of learning content. Learning and development teams can create content for educational courses, instructional videos, quizzes and AI video avatars and have it translated into any language they desire, the company said. "Smartcat's AI for learning content has streamlined the course creation process allowing us to develop full courses and micro-learnings in minutes, using natural language inputs," said Mark Stauffer, senior learning and development manager at Brink's Co. "It's worth its weight in gold." Left Lane Capital Managing partner Vinny Pujji said he's backing Smartcat because its platform delivers benefits for every stakeholder in the translation industry. "As an early market mover, the company has a broad portfolio of customers and is uniquely positioned to compound the depth and quality of their product offering, continuing to lock-in competitive advantages over time," he said.