> We are now translating over 1,000,000 customer service messages a month<p>> The company told us it now has more than 100k registered translators providing translation services for its platform.<p>So... each human translator translates (on average) 10 messages per month. In fact, <i>less than</i> 10, because (presumably) some messages are also translated by AI.<p>Odd numbers.
Congratulations to Unbabel, but I've heard some nasty horror stories about the inside and I would be skeptical of any claim to become the "world's translation layer".<p>However, if investors are willing to risk it, then good luck to them. More Portugese tech companies getting funding is always a good thing!
Among other things, europe's language diversity is listed as one of the reasons why europe isn't a good place for founding a tech company: the american market is much more homogenous. However, for translation startups, this diversity makes europe the best place to be in the world.<p>They definitely won't run out of diversity, and it also has the european single market which makes it easy to conduct business across inner-european borders. Furthermore, the single market is only a recent addition so many companies and governments which start having to communicate across language barriers are still figuring out how to do it. Canada for example already has an established system as Switzerland has, too. But on an european level, the market is new and fresh and there is no incumbent that needs to be disrupted. It's great to see unbabel and deepl choosing europe as their main base of operations.