We’ve just closed a $50M Series B led by CRV, and joined by Creandum and Dawn Capital. Existing investors include Chalfen Ventures, 3VC, S16VC, as well as angel investors: Alistair Russell, Andrey Khusid, Carlos Gonzalez-Cardenas, Charles Songhurst, Daniel Dines, Des Traynor, Dom Lewis, Eugene Katz, Guillaume Cabane, Matt Robinson, Nicolas Dessaigne, Rich Waldron, and Stephane Kurgan. Below, we’ll give an insight into what we plan to do with our latest funding.
When Petr and I founded Lokalise, it wasn’t with the intention to march through a Series A and then to B and then to who knows what’s next. We simply saw that the localization industry was stuck in the past. The primary business model relied on outdated methods like files and email, which didn’t work for us. We knew it mustn’t be working for the hundreds of thousands of companies facing the same problem. By combining localization with a modern approach to software internationalization, we set out to fix the process.
In the year since we raised our Series A funding, we’ve grown from a tool used almost exclusively by developers to the localization platform of choice for any teams building digital products, including those at Revolut, Arduino, and Hyundai. Our investors understand what we’re trying to accomplish. By lowering the cost and speeding the delivery of localization we can change the market, enabling any company to have a global presence from day one. That will take us a long way towards our vision of a world where choice isn’t limited by language.
Improving our product
Lokalise started as a tool for developers. It helped to embed localization into the development process while providing translators with the context to ensure quality. Eventually, we evolved into a continuous localization and translation management platform for agile teams of developers, product managers, localization managers, and designers building digital products.
The next stage of our evolution is becoming the platform that connects different localization/translation tools, streamlines translation management, translatable content storage, and language service providers.
It goes without saying that we’ll also be continuously improving our product to create the best possible experience for our customers. In the short term, that focus will be on enhancements to the platform catering to the specific needs of customer support teams and enterprise customers.
Ramping up our hiring
Today, there’s over 180 Lokalisers, of 36 nationalities, spread over way too many countries for us to keep track of as most of them keep moving around. One of the main reasons we sought Series A funding was to allow us to recruit the best possible candidates. Shifting to a fully remote company has allowed us to hire the best irrespective of where they base themselves. This latest funding round will allow us to do this at a higher speed.
We’re not interested in adding as many people as possible to the team but adding the right people to help us retain the open, empathetic, ambitious culture the company was built on. We’re confident we have a strong core team in place to make this possible.
Building partnerships
Great things can happen when you work together and in our industry it’s particularly relevant. Our relationships with the hundreds of general tech and language tech providers as well as the many LSPs we work with have been fundamental to our success. We’re now building a dedicated team to foster existing and seek out new partnerships. The good news here is that the beneficiary of strong partnerships is often the end user so expect to see new apps and integrations with which to simplify and accelerate your localization processes coming your way soon.
Spreading the word
We’ve been so hell-bent on building a great product over the last few years that we’ve been guilty of not letting enough people know about it. Relative to other SaaS companies, our spend on marketing to date has been relatively small. Six months ago, we had a team of two doing everything from staging webinars, to writing blog posts. We relied on word-of-mouth recommendations from our loyal customer base of developers. Today, we’ve a team of 10+ with still some vacancies open focused on ensuring more companies are aware of the importance of localization in any well structured growth plan.
Tonight, we may have just added more money in the bank but we’ll be putting it to work straight away. We’re building the platform for all your localization and translation requirements, as well as growing the team to support it.
