Enterprise language translation company Smartcat Platform Inc. said today it has closed on a $43 million Series C funding round led by Left Lane Capital to fuel its expansion.
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.