Smartling, a NYC startup that helps major companies like Shopify and Lyft translate their web pages to different languages, announced Thursday it has raised $160 million of fresh funding. The growth investment was led by Battery Ventures, and will be used to further innovate the product and grow the team.
By combining its AI-powered translation tools and a team of human translators, Smartling is able to localize a given company’s content for a particular market and automatically translate that content to the appropriate language. When new content appears, it is flagged and sent to translators for rewriting, and the changes are delivered to front-end users independently from other app updates.
While cool, these capabilities are also very important in our increasingly digital world. Thanks to the internet, businesses don’t just reach people from their country of origin anymore — the entire world has access to their site. And, of course, people are much more likely to buy a product if the site they are buying it from is in a language they can understand, so accurate translations are a must. Plus, international expansions are a common priority to fast growing companies, and that typically means moving into countries that speak different languages.
“Two truisms have emerged about today’s enterprises: all business is global, and content drives global business,” Smartling’s co-founder and CEO Jack Welde said in a statement. “The third leg of that stool is translation, since nearly all customers want to buy in their own language.”
As a result, the larger online translation market is growing fast, reaching $49.6 billion in 2019. And Morad Elhafed, a general partner at Battery Ventures, says Smartling is “primed to capitalize on it.”
“Enterprises generally succeed on the strength of technology, supply chains, people and workflows. As content has become essential to go-to-market strategies, content distribution has in some sense become its own supply chain and workflow,” he continued in a statement. “And, as that content supply chain extends globally, translation at scale has become the critical last mile for global enterprise growth.”
