DeepL Raises $300 Million to Grow AI-Powered Translation, Writing Platform

DeepL has raised $300 million to continue growing its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that provides translations and writing assistance for businesses.

The funding round was led by Index Ventures and valued the company at $2 billion, DeepL said in a Wednesday (May 22) press release.

DeepL’s Language AI platform solves real problems for global companies, Jarek Kutylowski, founder and CEO of DeepL, said in the release.

“We’re highly focused on continued growth and innovation to expand our solutions and ensure they remain industry-leading in terms of quality, precision and security,” Kutylowski said. “This will bring us closer to a future where every company, regardless of location, can operate seamlessly on a global scale with our AI.”

DeepL was founded in 2017 and has a customer network that now includes more than 100,000 businesses, governments and other organizations in 63 global markets, according to the release. Customers use its platform for internal communications, customer support and international market expansion.

Over the past year, the company has accelerated its expansion efforts and strategic investments, the release said. These efforts include its opening of its first office in the United States in January.

In terms of products, DeepL added an AI-powered writing assistant called DeepL Write Pro, which is specifically tailored for business writing, and continued to expand the number of languages supported by its platform, bringing them 32, per the release.

“DeepL’s runaway success is a bit of an ‘open secret’ in the business community,” Danny Rimer, partner at Index Ventures, said in the release. “The company is exceptionally thoughtful about creating cutting-edge AI products that deliver real and immediate value to their customers.”

The company become an AI unicorn in January 2023 when a funding round valued it at $1.085 billion.

At that time, DeepL had emerged as one of the most disruptive players in the machine translation space, saying on its website that in blind tests, professional translators rated its translations as three times better than those of its competitors such as Google, Microsoft and Meta.

While the company offers a free online translation service, it saves its most advanced technology for those who pay via a translation-as-a-service model for businesses.

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