Paris-based, Weglot, which builds a no-code website translation solution for the internet, has announced a €45 million growth investment from Partech, the European VC which also invested in koRo and Zaapi recently.
Weglot: the translation solution
The global economy has taken some severe hits recently. First the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, have led to a downturn in profits for businesses worldwide. To stay ahead of the curve, it is more important than ever for businesses to expand their online presence beyond their native borders. But here-in lays a painful set of obstacles to overcome. Enter Weglot.
When a business wants to add a payment method to their website, there are many existing plugins available to choose from. The same goes for chat bots, instant messaging, and many other useful updates that help a site perform better and reach more people. However, when it comes to translating a website to another language, there is no quick, reliable service that will do it all with a few clicks. Except that all changed when Weglot launched in 2016.
Augustin Prot, co-founder Weglot also spoke exclusively to TFN and shares, “It takes minutes to plug-in Weglot to your website. For example, if you have a website in English, let’s say you want to have it in French and Spanish, you can add them to the website without coding. And then we will display your first version of your website in French, for example, and in Spanish, with translations. You will be able to manage translations in real time directly from your account.”
Weglot’s primary goal is to provide a product to B2B and B2C clients that removes most of the time, stress, and expense involved in translating websites into different languages. Traditional methods of translating a website involve hiring a professional translator, using translation software such as Google Translate or Microsoft Translate, or a combination of both. Hiring a professional can get extremely expensive if the website has many pages, and both options take many months to implement on larger sites. Furthermore, the process must be repeated for each language the website will cater for.
The road ahead!
The latest investment will allow Weglot to scale the development of its solution further, do new hirings and accelerate its expansion, helping to build on its mission of helping anyone to translate their website effortlessly.
Weglot’s co-founders, Augustin Prot and Rémy Berda, got the idea to fill this need in the market when Berda was looking for a “magic solution” to translate a site he was working on. “The idea actually came from Rémy,” explains Prot, “when he had to add payment to the website, he found a magical solution with tribe, when he had to do text messages on the website, he found the magical solutions with Twilio. But when he wanted to translate the website, he didn’t find any magical solution.” He continued, “When you want to do translations for a multilingual website, it’s very painful, it’s time consuming.”
The thirty-strong team have built an easy to use, fully customisable product that has already been adopted by over 50,000 businesses worldwide including Microsoft, Spotify, Steve Madden, Murad, Crabtree & Evelyn, and Volcom. Where traditional methods can take months, Weglot’s translation software can be applied to any website and convert it to any language, or languages, in minutes. And it does it at a fraction of the cost of hiring professionals to translate the site manually.
Prot and Berda have only pursued funding once before, a year after setting up Weglot. The 2017 seed round was led by Side Capital. This time the €45m funding will be led by Partech, one of the most active tech investors in the world.
“We are thrilled to welcome our new investor on board and excited to build on the growth we’ve built up over the last 6 years. Partech is an excellent partner to help us accelerate our expansion and allow us to scale the business. This significant milestone will allow us to become the category leader for web translation.” Announced co-founder Augustin Prot.”
Bruno Crémel, General Partner at Partech Growth explained what attracted Partech to get involved with Weglot, “We are very excited to partner with Augustin, Rémy, and the whole Weglot team. We have been tremendously impressed with their commitment to product quality, and the customer-centric culture they have built over the last 6 years. With this latest round, Weglot is ideally positioned to capture the large opportunity ahead and become the undisputable category leader in no-code web-app localisation.”
Prot concludes, “Our goal is to build Weglot into the category leader. We thought it was maybe the time to have more money, to be able to take more risk, and to strengthen the team and hire more engineering, sales, and marketing teams.”
