AI company Unbabel will invest EUR 78 million to translate Portugal into the Future. The Portuguese AI translation platform intends to position Portugal to spearhead AI developments.
The economic spillover is expected to reach EUR 250 million in total exports by 2030 with the development of 21 new AI products. A report from Verified Market Research shows a 2.8 percent growth in the translation industry by 2028, representing a total value of $46.22 billion.
Unbabel, that raised a total Series C funding of $ 100 M, was elected among the top Portuguese scale-ups and is among the major global companies in the field. Founder Vasco Pedro stated that the US market accounts for 70% of revenues, but that Europe and Asia are part of their growth strategy as they intend to corner the market in the field of multilingual customer service.
With headquarters in San Francisco, Unbabel works with leading brands such as Booking.com, Nestle, Panasonic, Patagonia and UPS. By removing language barriers and blending AI, Portuguese Unbabel is discovering new frontiers.
New frontiers in the field include the Fintech sector that is disrupting User Experience in Banking. Fintech disruption is to be reflected in a global market growth that is expected to triple by 2028 to reach $ 332.5 billion. Fintech companies can scale-up by providing their products across multiple languages without hiring translators or using generic machine translation for marketing and customer support, including chatbots.
Google translates more than 300 trillion words on a yearly basis, while the professional translation industry produces around 200 billion words yearly. With major players in this field, such as Microsoft Bing Translator, Yandex MT, Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon and Apple, Machine Translation is more productive overall.
Research by Gartner forecasts that 75% of translations will be done through AI, while human input will be used for editing purposes. According to Forbes, the market for online education services will reach $ 325 billion by 2025, and this is yet an untapped market.
More brands are reaching a multilingual audience globally through Transcreation, which is a term coined from Translation and Creation. Multilingual SEO strategies allow users to optimize content for different markets for e-Commerce or even for video content.
The Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) is central to innovative projects. The RRP will implement investments that will help translate Portugal into the future, through economic growth. It is part of the EU strategy for 2030 that includes smart growth and innovation.
Translating Portugal into the future and discovering new frontiers, the Unbabel consortium, that comprises 11 start-ups and 2 unicorns, is pushing ahead of the game.
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