DeepL, the Cologne-based unicorn that competes with machine translation giants like Google Translate, today announced a new investment of $300 million (€277 million), reaching a valuation of $2 billion.
The startup, which emerged from the online dictionary Linguee, was founded in 2017 by Jarek Kutylowski, who also serves as the company's CEO.
DeepL offers free and premium AI translation services with a particular focus on B2B products where the company sees the greatest demand.
It now covers 32 languages and has 100,000 business users. A list that includes companies such as Nikkei, Coursera and Deutsche Bahn.
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The investment follows a period of significant growth for DeepL. Within the last 12 months, the startup opened its first office in the US and expanded its language portfolio to include Arabic, Norwegian and Korean. New products for companies were also launched, such as the AI assistant DeepL Write Pro.
The new funding “comes in what is expected to be DeepL's most transformative year yet and is a testament to the critical role our speech AI platform plays in solving the complex linguistic challenges facing global enterprises today,” Kutylowski said.
The advantage of DeepL
DeepL claims to offer the world's best AI machine translation, enabling more nuanced and accurate results compared to its competitors. In some of our own tests here at TNW, the startup actually comes out on top.
The company's success lies in the architecture of its neural network, its training data and the input of human editors.
According to Kutylowski, DeepL's lead is also the result of hard work, a great team and focus.
“Focus is always an important thing,” he told TNW during an interview in December. “Translation is not Google's core business – it's one of the 100 side jobs. The same is true if you look at the LLMs and the OpenAIs of the world as our competition; translation is just one thing they do, and their GPU does a lot of different things. We focus on a specific area.”
Index Ventures led the financing round with participation from ICONIQ Growth, Teachers' Venture Growth and Atomico, among others.
DeepL plans to continue investing in R&D innovation, global market expansion and talent acquisition.
