The Portuguese Language Operations platform Unbabel, a CMU Portugal longtime partner and currently one of the Program’s affiliated partners, has secured $21 million in funding. This latest funding round was made possible through the support of prominent investors including Iberis Capital, GED Ventures Portugal, Point 72, Notion, ScaleVentures Partners, and Caixa Capital. The capital injection will be used to drive Unbabel’s global growth strategy and strengthen its position on the path to profitability.
Established in 2013, Unbabel’s Customer Service Solution allows modern enterprises to understand and be understood by their customers in dozens of languages by combining human expertise and artificial intelligence (AI). Powered by AI and refined by a global community of translators, Unbabel combines the speed and scale of machine translation with the authenticity that can come only from a native speaker.
Unbabel HQ is currently located in San Francisco, California, and has offices in Portugal, the United States, United Kingdom, Romania, the Philippines, Germany, Bulgaria, and Israel.
The company was founded by Vasco Pedro, a graduate from CMU’s Language Technology Institute (LTI) and CMU Portugal project post-doctoral fellow. André Martins, CMU Portugal alumni, is the company’s VP of Artificial Intelligence Research.
The company has also led one of CMU Portugal Large large-scale collaborative Projects MAIA (2020-2023), focused on developing a multilingual conversational platform supported by machine translation and dialogue systems, where AI agents assist human agents.
Vasco Pedro, co-founder and CEO explained in a public notice disclosed by the company that “From day one, we believed that language is the way to create a common understanding among cultures, businesses, and customers worldwide. In the past year, we announced two significant acquisitions for Unbabel – the German EVS Translations and the Israeli Bablic – and this funding is another step aligned with our acquisition strategy. Making Unbabel profitable will enhance its scalability and that is what we are focused on, now with the vote of confidence from this group of investors.”
