On May 25, 2021, remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) platform, Interactio, announced that it had closed a USD 30m series A. The RSI platform was founded in Lithuania in 2014 and, according to CEO and Co-founder, Henrikas Urbonas, “Up until this round, Interactio had raised only USD 2.06m from a number of funds and angel investors.”
Urbonas told Slator, “Most of our previous investors participated in this round,” including VC funds Change Ventures, Practica Capital, 70 Ventures, Lemonade Stand Ventures, as well as angel investors Justas Janauskas and Gabija Grusaite, Mindaugas Bruzas, and Andrius Slimas.
The series A was led by new investors Eight Roads Ventures and Silicon Valley VC fund, Storm Ventures. Eight Roads was one of Alibaba’s earliest backers (ca. 1999), still holding shares in the online shopping giant to this day; while Storm Ventures’ portfolio includes CRM platform Pipedrive and Talkdesk, the cloud-based call-center software provider valued at USD 3bn (as of its July 2020 USD 143m series C).
Also participating in Interactio’s series A were Practica Capital, Notion Capital, and angels Jaan Tallinn (Skype Co-founder) and Young Sohn (former Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung).
“Two of our new investors will join the board,” Urbonas said, “Lucile Cornet, Partner at Eight Roads, and Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-founder of Storm Ventures.”
Declining to discuss Interactio’s valuation, the CEO would only say that “the company is profitable” with “12 times run-rate growth in 2020,” and that “the majority of revenue comes from returning clients.”
Slator 2020 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report
Interactio’s clients include the European Commission (EC), European Parliament (EP), and the United Nations. Asked for an update on their work with the EC, Urbonas said, “Up to now, the European Commission has been using Interactio on a daily basis; but the new long-term contract selection is still ahead, so we cannot comment anything more at this point.”
Urbonas likewise declined to comment on their recent EP deal win, only saying that they also “continue to work with the EP on a daily basis.”
Beyond Large Institutions
Part of the series A funds will go toward building the Interactio team, which currently stands at 130 full-time employees. Urbonas said, “We plan to expand the team a few times, especially in Western Europe. Brussels and France are one of our target markets for hiring.” The Lithuania-based RSI platform also plans to fill roles in the US.
The CEO added, “We are planning to expand the team across all departments and verticals. Some of the roles we are hiring for include Head of Design, VP of Engineering, Remote Interpreters Training Managers, Technical Customer Success Managers, and Customer Success Managers.”
What about R&D and M&A? According to Urbonas, “Our number one priority is continuous improvement of the product and service quality while growing the business. To sustain our tenfold growth, we already started investing heavily in R&D. M&A could [also] be considered.”
Urbonas told Slator that their focus “was and still is” large institutions (i.e., EC, EP, UN), “where there is no place for error and they need the most professional solution; so the priority for current expansion remains the same. The next step will be to expand our client base to corporate clients and a larger public that has the need for professional multilingual communication.”
“Our vision is to enable billions of people to speak in their preferred language,” the Interactio CEO said.
Image: Interactio Team
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