Smartcat secures $43M for its AI-powered translation platform
Smartcat, a Boston-based startup providing AI-powered translation services, has raised $43 million in a funding round.
Can AI ever fully replace translators? Not likely. AI translations tend to lack the lexical richness of their human-translated counterparts, mainly because AI models make choices based on probability — not lived experience. Certainly, AI can produce “accurate” translations, but the translations lack the spice of life, like a textbook version of the source text.
For many companies, accuracy is all that’s required, making the AI translation sector an attractive one. Smartcat, founded in 2016, is among the vendors providing automated translation tools geared toward enterprises, and its co-founder and CEO, Ivan Smolnikov, says business is good.
“We have over 1,000 corporate customers, including 20% of the Fortune 500,” he told TechCrunch. “While most of Smartcat’s clients are large global enterprises, we also count many local and international government entities among them.”
Before founding Smartcat, Smolnikov was a physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he researched fiber optics materials. After two years in the lab, Smolnikov decided to try his hand at entrepreneurship, founding the language services company ABBYY LS.
It’s at ABBYY where Smolnikov incubated Smartcat, in fact, which spun out as an independent entity in 2016. Smolnikov left ABBYY, where he was a board member at the time, the same year.