Denmark-based language software provider, EasyTranslate, has raised more than EUR 3m (USD 3.3m) from Pride Capital Partners, an Amsterdam-based software and IT investor focused on the Benelux, DACH, and Nordic regions.
Although EasyTranslate declined to share any specific financial information (i.e., revenues or related to the transaction), EasyTranslate’s Founder and CEO, Frederik Pedersen, told Slator the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased by nearly 250% in 2022.
Pedersen said the funds will be raised to increase organic growth and, specifically, to further develop its “Content Generation tool which is based on ChatGPT by OpenAI.”
Pedersen said EasyTranslate’s new backers saw the potential in the the company after it “transitioned from a translation service to a software company in a short period of time,” which according to him, “drastically enhanced the scalability.” EasyTranslate is Pride Capital Partners’ first investment in the Nordics.
ChatGPT — a “Game Changer” for the Translation Workflow
Founded in 2010, EasyTranslate offers a marketplace of freelancers coupled with translation management software. Pedersen described the recent integration of ChatGPT into the translation workflow as “an absolute game changer,” explaining that it enables customers to automatically generate source content that will then be used as an input for translation.
Slator 2022 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report
Moreover, he said, EasyTranslate is currently enabling integrations with CMS, PIM, and other systems, such as Shopify, so the translation flow will run “without [customers] having to jump between different software.” Customers in the e-commerce and software sectors — key segments for EasyTranslate — are the main target audience for the content generation tool because they “constantly need to produce a lot of dynamic content,” Pedersen observed.
The CEO said the tool “not only generates compelling content but also learns from your inputs and lets you add copywriters for final touch-ups.” The option to add copywriters to edit the AI content will be available in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, customers can either choose to assign freelance translators from EasyTranslate’s marketplace or “rely on AI.”
Asked for an update on current trading, Pedersen said the company expects a deficit in the current financial year, but also expects to double the number of customers. (The current total is more than 180 paid customers as well as 1,500 free account users).
He added, “It can be capital-intensive to grow annual subscription revenue — and that is where the investors step in. Our goal is to be profitable on a monthly basis by the end of the year.”
EasyTranslate’s announcement of its integration with ChatGPT is one of the first public examples of OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) being deployed for content creation upstream from a professional translation workflow. Given all of the general hype around ChatGPT and the discussion around the performance of ChatGPT for translation, the industry can expect more examples to follow.
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