DeepL raised an astounding $300M at a $2B valuation to drive B2B growth
DeepL, a German AI startup focused on enterprise language translation and writing tools, raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation led by Index Ventures to drive sales, marketing, and R&D efforts as it aims to scale its offering amid rising competition in the AI translation space.
German AI company DeepL has raised $300 million in new funding to fuel its expansion into business language translation services. The round was led by Index Ventures, valuing DeepL at over $2 billion. ICONIQ Growth, Teachers’ Venture Growth, and existing investors IVP, Atomico, and WiL also backed DeepL's funding round. DeepL's text translation and writing products compete against offerings such as Grammarly or Google Translate. However, unlike the latter, which tend to appeal to the consumer market, DeepL focuses mostly on the business market.
DeepL has built a significant user base, with over 100,000 businesses and organizations relying on its services. According to CEO and founder Jarek Kutylowski, the company has grown organically up until now. Thus, one of DeepL's most immediate goals is to invest the raised funds to boost its sales and marketing efforts to attract more customers and deepen its collaborations with existing ones. In particular, DeepL needs to ensure it does not fall into the trap where teams under pressure by executives may be scrambling to offer proof of concept that AI applications work for the organization, only to find that none of the projects prosper beyond the testing or small deployment phase.
The company's other priority is research and development. DeepL supports 32 languages and recently added a business writing assistant called DeepL Write Pro to its offering lineup. Although DeepL's customer roster includes the likes of Zendesk, Nikkei, Coursera, and Deutsche Bahn, the company must ensure it stays on top of its game, especially given the increasing pressure being put on DeepL by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft's automated translation services, and the possibility that OpenAI or Anthropic may also want to try their hand at offering similar translation and writing services.
