This number speaks to all languages: Transfluent has announced to Gigaom that the company has raised a €1.46 million ($2 million) “pre-series A” to further penetrate into the U.S. market. The round was backed by Vision+, Tekes money, and international angel investors. CEO Jani Penttinen tells Gigaom that they plan to raise an “actual series A” later this year.
It seems in the past, ArcticStartup was full of Transfluent news as they were one of Helsinki’s sweetheart startups – the idea of providing fast human-powered transition services for social media and customer service actually had legs. After announcing $1 million funding in September of 2012, the company opened an office in New York, and we hadn’t heard too much about them since then.
But the company has been busy, opening up a Sunnyvale, California office as well as launching a customer service transalation service for Copenhagen-founded Zendesk.
As they point out in the press release:
Transfluent’s sales have increased globally, and with combined effect of the new US sales the company reports 900% year-on-year increase in sales. Much of the sales come from translation services that have not been available so far; near real-time social media and customer service. Instead of cannibalizing the existing translation market, Transfluent has managed to expand the translation market by enabling translation of content that could not be translated before.
Transfluent also claims to have added the 50,000th translator to their network. “We can now serve our clients better than ever, in more than 80 languages, near real-time and around the clock,” says Jani Penttinen, founder and CEO of Transfluent.
The company is hiring in California and Helsinki.
