Lilt Labs | Bridging Translation Research and Practice

Announcing Lilt's Series C Financing

Written by Spence Green | April, 7, 2022
Mission > GX

In ordinary times, a company milestone announcement would begin with a proclamation of progress and achievement. But these are extraordinary times, and as a society we face an unprecedented array of challenges: the lasting effects of a global pandemic, a ground war in Europe, rising inflation, labor and energy shortages, and fractious politics in most of the world. Easing this societal and economic turmoil is most important and should be our focus. Lilt has a role to play in addressing some of these challenges.

In 2015 we started Lilt with the ambition to make the world’s information available to everyone. By making the internet work for all people we believe that we can increase mutual understanding and access to opportunity. Today our product is used in a broad set of applications ranging from e-commerce to national security. We enable Intel to sell chips and ASICS to sell shoes. We enable investors to make trading decisions and explore new markets. We enable immigrant parents to read and understand their kids’ school materials. Thanks to the internet every organization is a global organization, and Lilt enables every organization to reach customers, build communities, and create value for all.

Through conversations with these global organizations over the last two years we’ve regularly heard a desire to deliver consistently authentic experiences to everyone. How can an engineer in Japan implementing a cybersecurity policy have the same great user experience with Orca as an English-speaking engineer? How can a Thai designer utilize the same tools and templates in Canva as an Australian?

In this global, integrated view of customer experience, which includes every digital touchpoint for every global customer, language is a core component of personalization. Every customer experience becomes a Global Experience (GX). While this seems like an obvious, growth-oriented goal, most businesses are limited by their organizational structures. Language is fragmented across functions, so consistency is impossible to achieve. To solve this problem, we believe that within five years, every leading global enterprise will have a strategic function dedicated to GX management.  

The next phase of Lilt is to realize this GX vision for all global organizations.

Announcement and Future

Today we’re thrilled to share that we’ve raised $55 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Four Rivers, joined by new investors Sorenson Capital, CLEAR Ventures and Wipro Ventures. The majority of the round came from our existing investors Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and XSeed Capital. This latest funding, along with the strong support of our new and existing investors, positions us to achieve our goal of building an enduring, independent company.

We plan to invest in three areas that form the foundation of GX.

First, we’re investing in research and engineering. We’re expanding our portfolio of GX connectors for enterprise systems such as Contentful, Figma, and Github. Lilt empowers creators in these systems to instantly preview information in all languages and then publish it with a quality verification. To support these workflows we’re building the next generation of our state-of-the-art, self-learning language translation system.

Second, we’re scaling our production capacity up and out. Volume has quadrupled in the last six quarters and continues to accelerate. We’ve recently added production hubs in Taiwan, Argentina, and Romania to support 24/7/365 operations. We’re also adding enterprise solutions and success functions to empower our customers to roll GX out across their systems and organizations. 

Finally, we’re expanding and specializing our customer-facing teams in North America, Europe, and Asia. Our customers appreciate dedicated partners in their timezones that understand their specific market and business context.

Customers

We believe in business as partnership. I’m most excited about the results we’ve helped our customers realize:

"Because content today has a shorter shelf life than before, we're constantly refreshing different parts of the global experience. The only way to meet this growing demand is with innovation and automation." -  Loic Dufresne de Virel, Head of Localization, Intel 

"Localization is critically important to our success, but it used to take a lot of our time and energy. Lilt has helped automate a lot of the manual processes and delivers consistently high quality translations which help us create a great user experience worldwide." - David Gogel, Head of Growth and Operations, dYdX Foundation  

"Enabling customers to access content in their preferred language creates an equitable and inclusive global experience for everyone involved." - Jason Maxwell, Vice President of Curriculum Production, Accelerate Learning

"The Lilt Team has been agile and instrumental in supporting our rapid growth into new global markets. Their team has helped us localize content quickly and accurately, often with tight deadlines. The Lilt integrator that we connected to our website CMS has also helped us manage the translation process, minimizing errors and streamlining workflow." - Hivestack

Future

The miracle that is the internet enables every organization to reach every person on Earth. Community is built through shared goals, mutual trust, and common understanding. Lilt exists to facilitate that common understanding by making the stories we tell and the narratives we share accessible to everyone.  

If you’re a business making a strategic investment in GX, then we’re excited to partner with you.

If you’re inspired by the mission of increasing access to opportunity and you want to join our team, read more about Careers at Lilt