ICONIQ Capital leads newest round of funding; total raised to date nears $65 million
NEW YORK – May 22, 2014 – Smartling, Inc., today announced it has closed a $25 million series D round of funding, led by ICONIQ Capital, a global multi-family office and merchant bank based in San Francisco. Smartling provides a software platform that helps companies to better compete globally by translating and managing their multilingual Web, mobile and business document content.
All of Smartling’s prior investors also participated in this round of funding, including First Round Capital, Harmony Partners, IDG Ventures, Tenaya Capital, U.S. Venture Partners and Venrock. Smartling will use the funding to expand operations both in the U.S. and abroad, and to enhance its platform with expanded support for leading content management, e-commerce, marketing automation and CRM platforms.
“Globalization is the most important trend in business today, and Smartling is the clear leader with a cloud platform that dramatically reduces the time and cost required for organizations to do business in any geography, in any language,” said Venrock Partner David Pakman. “Smartling is solving a huge business problem in an elegant way with an innovative SaaS solution – this is why the company has attracted such intense interest from the venture community.”
Hundreds of enterprises ranging from Global 2000 corporations to leading Web-based businesses like Nokia, Pinterest, Shutterstock, Sony, Spotify, SurveyMonkey, Tesla Motors and Vimeo use Smartling as the “nerve center” for their global business content. Smartling enables them to reduce the time and effort involved with translating, localizing and delivering content both for foreign and domestic multicultural markets, while also providing globalization-aware content management capabilities that automatically ensure content consistency across all languages. These capabilities enable organizations to reduce time-to-market and slash operating costs associated with traditional approaches to creating and managing multilingual content.
“Only 30 percent of the world speaks English – so companies that don’t effectively globalize are missing out on 70 percent of their potential addressable market,” said Smartling CEO Jack Welde. “Smartling enables businesses to compete and win in new markets quickly and effectively, and to more effectively connect and support their customers. Even companies that have been global for decades are turning to Smartling as a more efficient way to move into new markets faster and to ensure global business consistency, while continuing to work with their existing translation service providers.”
Welde said that Smartling is planning to expand its employee base in 2014 with more than 50 new hires. In addition to its New York office, the company recently opened offices in Boston and Dublin, Ireland.
About Smartling Smartling, Inc. simplifies and accelerates translation and localization for companies both reaching a global market and looking to expand their market penetration. With the first cloud-based enterprise platform for a translation management system, Smartling helps companies quickly translate and deploy their websites and dynamic Web applications, mobile applications and business documents across the entire corporate digital infrastructure. Named “Most Innovative Startup” at Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal’s 2011 FASTech 50, Smartling is shaking up the translation and localization industry with the first platform designed to manage the entire translation, localization and delivery process via a scalable SaaS model. Brands that rely on Smartling to launch and manage localized multilingual websites and applications include Dropbox, Foursquare, GoPro, HotelTonight, Path, Pinterest, Shutterstock, Spotify, SurveyMonkey, Tesla Motors, Uber, Vimeo and more. The Smartling platform currently serves billions of page views per month in more than 100 languages across the globe.
Founded in 2009 and headquartered in New York City, Smartling is privately held and backed by leading venture capital firms, including First Round Capital, Harmony Partners, ICONIQ Capital, IDG Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and several prominent angel investors.
Contact:
Jackie Gerbus
Davies Murphy Group
+1 508-479-2786
