Unbabel Inc. Raises $1.5M in Seed Funding From Matrix Partners, Google Ventures and Other Leading Venture Capital Firms and Angel Investors

Unbabel Eliminates Language Barriers Between Companies and Their Customers


SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 18, 2014) - Unbabel, the most advanced translation platform combining artificial intelligence with crowd translation, today announced that it has raised $1.5M in funding from leading venture capital firms and angel investors, including Jared Fliesler of Matrix Partners, Kevin Rose of Google Ventures, Elad Gil, Raymond Tonsing of Caffeinated Capital, Roger Dickey, Young Guo of IDG Partners, zPark Ventures, Stephan Morais of Caixa Capital, Alexandre Barbosa of Faber Ventures, Shilling Capital Partners, Ryan and David Petersen, Jacob Soto, Digital Garage, FundersClub, Klaus Von-Wittgenstein and WeFunder. Funds will be used to grow Unbabel's engineering and marketing teams in order to improve its core translation process and expand its customer base.

"Unbabel is the future of translation. This incredible team has created a service which represents the shift that's happening cross-industry -- using technology to empower independent workers and connect them with the businesses that can benefit from their skill sets," said Jared Fliesler, general partner at Matrix Partners. "As we continue to see a surge in highly efficient vertical labor marketplaces, eliminating the middleman, the implications are enormous for both the global workforce and the future of innovation."

Unbabel eliminates language barriers between companies and their customers by combining artificial intelligence with human translators to deliver a scalable and affordable solution to high quality translation. Unbabel offers an API for easy integration with companies' internal content creation and translation workflows. Unbabel recently launched a beta version of its Zendesk plugin that enables customer service reps to support customers seamlessly in any language.

"We are thrilled to welcome such an amazing group of investors who care deeply about eliminating language barriers and who recognize the tremendous impact this can have on global business operations," said Vasco Pedro, Unbabel's co-founder and CEO. "Translation is a huge problem for every business that wants to have an international presence. We need to create fundamentally new ways to provide scalable human-quality translations if we want to enable communication between an increasingly interconnected world."

To try Unbabel's translation service, please visit www.unbabel.com.

About Unbabel
Unbabel is a Y Combinator company that offers Translation as a Service to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering human quality translation and fully enable global connections. Unbabel combines machine translation with crowd post editing for accurate, natural results. Unbabel was founded in August 2013. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California with offices in Lisbon, Portugal.

Unbabel