The AI-powered language translation platform Unbabel has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Notion Capital and Caixa Capital.
Unbabel was founded in 2013 in Lisbon and is now headquartered in San Francisco. The young company graduated from Y Combinator in 2014. The Unbable team intends to use the fresh capital to enhance its Unbabel Language Engine which combines machine learning and 40,000 human editors to translate languages.
Vasco Pedro, the CEO of Unbabel stated: “We still think humans play a hugely important role in the process, but much further up the stack, atop cutting edge tech that does 95% of the job for them. With this approach, we can translate text faster and cheaper, including types of content that were previously seen as untranslatable like emails and chat.”
By the way: Las year we mentioned Unbabel as one of the “5 Portuguese startups to look out for in 2015“.
Chris Tottman, Partner at Notion Capital explained: “When we looked at the results Unbabel was delivering for customers like Pinterest, Oculus VR, UnderArmour and SkyScanner, the value was off the charts. For one customer, support cases fell by 20% and customer satisfaction shot up by over 50%. For another, their USA-based customer service managers used Unbabel to “speak” German, with a much higher CSAT score than the native German speakers they had previously used.”
