Unbabel lands $23 million in new funding

It could have been any other Thursday. I woke up, had yoghurt and cereal for breakfast, walked the dog and took the metro to work.

But, as I strolled towards the office on the 11th of January, Slack and email notifications began to multiply, and upon arriving at the Tower, colleagues had already doubled their normal coffee intake.

It was with some sense of pride that we were able to tell the world that we’d successfully raised $23 million in Series B funding from an incredible roster of world-class investment firms, including Scale Ventures Partners, Notion, Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung NEXT, among many others.

Here’s what some of them had to say:

“Unbabel is eliminating the language barrier for large enterprises to easily serve a global customer base. Never before have companies been able to easily integrate translation into daily workflow in a cost effective way. This integration is setting up Unbabel to be the central hub for translation in the enterprise.”
— Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale Venture Partners

“We’re excited to support Unbabel as they bring their AI-powered human translations to more enterprises around the world. By positioning themselves at the nexus of machine translation and professional services, Unbabel offers a unique solution to help organizations reach more customers, more effectively, at scale.”
— Itxaso del Palacio Aguirre, Partner at Microsoft Ventures

“Salesforce Ventures invests in the next generation of enterprise technology to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform and deliver even greater value to our customers. We are pleased to support Unbabel’s growth and enable their AI-powered translation platform to help even more companies around the world deliver incredible service experiences.”
— Alex Kayyal, EMEA Head, Salesforce Ventures

And with Techcrunch, VentureBeat and Tech.eu leading with the news, I could finally tell my mom.

“Wow! As if having clients like Booking.com, EasyJet, Facebook, Pinterest and Skyscanner on your books wasn’t exciting enough, honey!”
— My mom

(My mother moonlights as an SEO consultant)

In official press release parlance, Unbabel CEO and co-founder Vasco Pedro had this to say:

“We started this business with the ambition to reach the 70% of internet users who don’t speak English, even as a second language. But the demand for global brands to serve customers in their native language has accelerated so fast that Unbabel must now take the next step of scale to meet it.”

That’s great for a newswire, but we thought we’d lure Vasco with a gas heater for a 5 minute chat about what this actually means.

[Editor’s note: yep, we need a better microphone next time]

Source: https://unbabel.com/blog/unbabel-lands-23-million-series-b/