NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Smartling, the Translation Delivery Network (TDN) company, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B round of financing. Existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital participated; IDG Ventures joins as a new investor. The company will use the funding to expand its world-class team and technology platform in its quest to democratize Web and mobile app localization.
“Smartling has an enormous market opportunity to empower Web application providers and publishers to go multilingual,” said Steve Krausz, general partner with U.S. Venture Partners, who joins Smartling’s Board of Directors. “I look forward to working even more closely with the team to accelerate its growth by leveraging their success to date.”
Smartling’s cloud-based platform is used by online giants, such as Foursquare, IMVU, Scribd and SurveyMonkey, to simplify the creation and maintenance of their multilingual sites. Smartling clients can leverage any combination of crowdsourced, professional or machine translation methods to deploy and maintain their sites.
“We see great potential in Smartling’s approach to this Web challenge,” said Alexander Rosen, a managing director with IDG Ventures. “With our firm’s deep media expertise, we’ll work to optimize the solution for publishers large and small.”
Every online business, regardless of size, wants to increase its “Y” variables over time: Web traffic, users, donors, sales, profit. With more than 70 percent of Internet users – or 1.4 billion people – claiming a language other than English as their preferred and primary language, there is a massive opportunity to increase “Y” with these new audiences. Smartling’s Web 2.0 solution modernizes and simplifies the aging localization process.
“We have been working hard to make the complex simple,” said Jack Welde, CEO, Smartling. “The Web is, by definition, worldwide, so every site and app should be multilingual. With this funding, we’ll continue to optimize our elegant, easy-to-use solution for this historically complex and costly technology process.”
Newly appointed member Steve Krausz, general partner, U.S. Venture Partners, joins Joseph Ansanelli; David Pakman, partner, Venrock; and Jack Welde, CEO, Smartling on the company’s Board of Directors.
About First Round Capital
First Round Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build remarkable companies. First Round Capital typically funds pre-revenue companies - and often provides a company`s first outside capital. As former entrepreneurs, the partners at First Round understand the challenges of launching a new enterprise, and strive to offer insight and expertise that are as valuable as its venture capital. The firm invests nationally with offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City.
About IDG Ventures
IDG Ventures invests in New Media and IT companies in the US. The IDG global network of technology venture funds has approximately $3.7 billion under management in Asia and North America, and works closely with International Data Group (IDG), the world’s largest IT media company. By combining the IDG platform - an unparalleled combination of global publishing, market research, and conference and exhibition resources - with years of hands-on experience in early-stage company building, IDG Ventures helps its portfolio companies understand their markets better and penetrate them faster than their competition. Leading technology companies that IDG has invested in include Netscape, Excite, Infoseek, Epiphany, F5 Networks, BabyCenter, Service Metrics, and Spinner.com in North America and Baidu, Ctrip, Focus Media, Memsic, SouFun, Tencent, and Vinagames in Asia.
About U.S. Venture Partners
U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) is a leading Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, helping entrepreneurs build world-class companies since 1981. USVP focuses on early stage opportunities in sectors where the Partners have the domain expertise, operating experience and network of relationships to contribute to the success of an enterprise. Currently, the firm invests in digital communications, network systems, consumer and business services, media, semiconductors, clean technologies, biopharmaceuticals and medical devices.
About Venrock
Venrock is a leading venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto, CA; New York, NY; and Cambridge, MA. Originally established as the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, Venrock continues an eight-decade tradition of partnering with entrepreneurs to establish successful, enduring companies. With a primary focus on technology, healthcare, and energy, portfolio companies have included Adify, Adnexus Therapeutics, Apple Computer, Athenahealth, Centocor, Check Point Software, DoubleClick, Gilead Sciences, Idec Pharmaceuticals, Illumina, Intel, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Sirna Therapeutics, StrataCom, and Vontu. For more information, please visit Venrock’s website at www.venrock.com and follow the firm on Twitter at @venrock.
About Smartling
Smartling helps online businesses reduce the time and cost of building and delivering multilingual websites and mobile apps. The Smartling Translation Delivery Network (TDN) is the first purpose-built platform for translation management and delivery; it currently serves more than 500 million page views per month. Headquartered in New York City, Smartling is privately held and backed by some the leading U.S. venture capital firms, including First Round Capital, IDG Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and several prominent angel investors. Visit www.smartling.com or follow @smartling.