Welcome to Mob76 Outlook, Frederik. Please tell us about EasyTranslate
Thanks for the invitation. We enable customers to create and translate quality content at half the price of any other service, by enabling generative AI and LLM technologies. As a result of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, the translation industry is about to change forever.
We believe that combining AI-GC with ‘humans in the loop’ will enable businesses to create company-specific language models in any language. We won’t translate anymore, we will do ground-up content creation in any language.
We make complicated AI/LLM technologies accessible to everyone, so that customers can utilise the latest AI-technology hassle-free in their content process without any need of prompt-engineers or machine learning engineers.
This enables the customers of any size to communicate engaging content in any language in a single infrastructure that is scalable and future proof.
Wow, that’s a big change, you sound like you’re ahead of the curve
ChatGPT and other AI-GC models are the biggest hype since the start of the internet. Already, 100s of start-ups are getting built, but what it takes to add real and unique value to the customers is still not 100% clear.
Current models are still general in its wording and would need training for each customer to learn their language and by then create real value.
We have created one flow for all of a customers’ content, so they can make engaging content that is optimised towards SEO and we train on the human edits so they can stand out in this content-overload world.
Moreover, we’ve recently reached the finals of the LocWorld Process Innovation Challenge, a highly prestigious competition that awards the most innovative companies in the localisation industry. The winner will be unveiled in Malmo next month.
You recently raised your first funding for Easy Translate?
We decided that we wouldn’t go through the normal investment cycles and bootstrapped the company for a decade. However, as the industry was being fundamentally changed by generative AI products, we raised more than $3 million in January this year.
The funding coincides with the launch of an innovative integration of LLMs that provides automated content generation and translation services. The new funds create room for further development of the new functionality and add to the ambition of accelerating EasyTranslate’s organic growth. In addition, this strategic partnership enables EasyTranslate to grow its market share by realising strategic acquisitions.
We believe that training customer specific LLMs by including copywriters in the loop in any language enables a better and more localised content output which will increase customer engagement and improve organic search ranking.
By challenging the current state of translating content we will see a major shift in the industry towards generating content with trained LLMs within the customers tone of voice and question the need of translation in many marketing content aspects.
From the fine-tuning of GPT-engines, EasyTranslate is planning to build out their own infrastructure of mini-LLMs trained on customer level to reach better levels of accuracy and less hallucination than using OpenAI’s GPT4 out of the box.
What about the early days of the company?
EasyTranslate was founded in 2010 as an online translation agency. We were recognised as one of the fastest-growing companies in our industry in our first 6 years and the youngest company to enter the list of 100 biggest Language Service Providers.
The industry was facing major pressure on pricing as all language service providers sell words and have a mark-up on the freelancers.
In 2020 we decided to do a full pivoting of our market positioning and decided to build our current platform solution where we give away our marketplace of verified freelancers and seamless training of AI enabled in a software that streamlines all those content processes across platforms.
How long have you been in business?
We are a small Danish startup in Copenhagen. We serve customers from 21 different countries across three continents and our tech team is located in Skopje, Macedonia. We have more than 10 years’ experience in running marketplaces with a mission to make custom language accessible for everyone for free.
We will do this by enabling AI-GC training on the fly from the edits human copywriters are doing. These trained models can be used cross-service, which means they will also do foundation for customer specific machine translation when needed. Two birds, one stone.
We have taken all our knowledge from creating a quality marketplace for localisation and content creations in combination with AI-technologies. We will be the first company to support ‘out of the box’ AI/LLM learning from edits that creates customer-specific models in any language.
These models will work cross functionally, so that customers have the ability to increase quality in both AI-GC and machine translation. The technology will be tailored to create SEO content as well.
We grew our SaaS business by 250% from 2021 to 2022 and we are expecting to reach the same level of growth in 2023. We are handling more than 11,000 projects and more than six million words per month.
What is the problem EasyTranslate is solving?
Quality multilingual content at scale. We are creating more content than ever before. From 2020 to 2022 the global online content grew by more than 50% (33 zettabytes
It’s the closest to an infinitive amount of content as 1 zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes. One terabyte is equal to 83 million pages. To stand out in the content overload, we have to create quality content that is worth engaging with and not ‘just content’.
Please walk us about the user experience
We have put our faith in a product-led growth strategy. This means, we are obsessed with the user experience from sign-up to creating the WOW moment. We provide our product as a Free/Freemium offering, so all users can expect to see value before they need to pay for our service.
We have around 300 company freemium signups monthly and they have the full self-service option to build their team of freelancers, integrate plug-ins to their CMS, PIM or directly to their Github repository to ensure the content flow runs smoothly and automatically without human interaction.
Customers can get started on a paid plan within our product without any interaction with sales reps. Starting price is 25 Euros per month for the annual subscription option.
We are educating customers about creating content in any language from ground up instead of translating content every time. One of the biggest challenges in the translation process is “garbage in, garbage out”.
The problem with low quality translation is often based on low quality source content. The end goal is to exit to an AI-GC or LSP, so we will need to make them aware and recognise that they need us to continue delivering value to their customers.
Why are you better than the other guys and who are your competitors?
We are the only one combining the ‘Human in the loop seamlessly and at a cost price’ that enables the seamless build up of a custom AI that is future-sustainable and makes our product critical infrastructure for our customers.
Easytranslate is up against potential competitors for free/cheap Machine Translation such as Google Translate, DeepL, Microsoft translate or Language Service Providers including LanguageWire and TextMaster. Then there’s translation management software such as Lokalise, Crowdin and Phrase.
But more recently, our real competitors are major generative AI tools, such as Jasper.ai.
Thanks, Frederik, it looks like great days are ahead for EasyTranslate. Prepare yourself for a trance of inbound from potential acquirers!
Thank you, Monty, a pleasure to have shared with your audience.