New York, NY, July 27, 2011
Smartling, the Translation Delivery Network (TDN) company, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B round of financing. Existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital participated; IDG Ventures joins as a new investor. The company will use the funding to expand its world-class team and technology platform in its quest to democratize web and mobile app localization.
“Smartling has an enormous market opportunity to empower web application providers and publishers to go multilingual,” said Steve Krausz, General Partner with U.S. Venture Partners, who joins Smartling’s Board of Directors. “I look forward to working even more closely with the team to accelerate its growth by leveraging their success to date.”
Smartling’s cloud-based platform is used by online giants, such as Foursquare, IMVU, Scribd and SurveyMonkey, to simplify the creation and maintainence of their multilingual sites. Smartling clients can leverage any combination of crowdsourced, professional or machine translation methods to deploy and maintain their sites.
“We see great potential in Smartling’s approach to this Web challenge,” said Alexander Rosen, a Managing Director with IDG Ventures. “With our firm’s deep media expertise, we’ll work to optimize the solution for publishers large and small.”
Every online business, regardless of size, wants to increase its “Y” variables over time: web traffic, users, donors, sales, profit. With more than 70 percent of Internet users – or 1.4 billion people – claiming a language other than English as their preferred and primary language, there is a massive opportunity to increase “Y” with these new audiences. Smartling’s Web 2.0 solution modernizes and simplifies the aging localization process.
“We have been working hard to make the complex simple,” said Jack Welde, CEO, Smartling. “The Web is, by definition, worldwide, so every site and app should be multilingual. With this funding, we’ll continue to optimize our elegant, easy-to-use solution for this historically complex and costly technology process.”
Newly appointed member Steve Krausz, General Partner, U.S. Venture Partners, joins Joseph Ansanelli; David Pakman, Partner, Venrock; and Jack Welde, CEO, Smartling on the company’s Board of Directors.
