DeepL, a Cologne-based startup that uses AI for language translation, has raised $300m at a $2bn valuation.
The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from ICONIQ Growth and Teachers’ Venture Growth as well as existing investors IVP, Atomico and WiL.
The deal comes off the back of a successful year for DeepL. It was one of just five private European tech firms to reach a billion-dollar valuation in 2023 and expanded to the US, now its third largest market, in January this year.
But 2023 wasn’t plain sailing, as the pace of AI innovation and sudden investor attention multiplied DeepL’s competitors.
“As a company, we’ve felt this,” its founder and CEO Jarosław Kutyłowski told Sifted in an interview in December last year.
What does DeepL do?
Founded in 2017, DeepL sells translation technology to businesses and other organisations and says it has “a customer network of 100k+ businesses, governments and other organisations worldwide” including Zendesk, Nikkei, Coursera and Deutsche Bahn.
It has developed its own generative AI model that’s specifically trained for translation, which the company says has helped it win enterprise clients by achieving more precise results than other products on the market.
The company faces competition against new models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which can translate voices in real-time, but the fresh funding gives it significant resources to keep improving its technology.
It’s also expanding its suite of products. In April it launched DeepL Write Pro — an AI-powered writing assistant that works a bit like Grammarly over a range of different languages. The company has also recently added Arabic, Korean and Norwegian to the languages its platform supports, bringing the total number to 32.
