Unbabel

Unbabel is a company providing a translation as a service platform that allows enterprises to understand and be understood by their customers. It is headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, and was founded in 2013 by Bruno Prezado, Hugo Silva, João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, and Vasco Pedro. It participated in the W14 cohort of Y Combinator.

Unbabel's platform offers translation services and a bot to help build multilingual understanding between companies and their customers. The platform uses a community of bilingual and freelance translators to provide human-quality translations to business customers. The platform combines these translators with artificial intelligence to offer the speed and scale of machine translation with the authenticity of native speakers. Unbabel's platform aims to allow companies to serve customers in their native language through digital channels.

The Unbabel Language Operations platform uses machine translation for its speed and efficiency and is augmented by the translations of native speakers and freelance translators. The aim is to offer high-quality translation for customer service across digital channels such as email, chat, and FAQs. The platform's translation engine is built to work as an unnoticed translation layer between users and their customers. Further, the engine can be customized and trained to match a corporation's brand in the different languages the brand uses.

The platform's use of native speakers and freelance translators is intended to ensure the platform's translations are high quality, offer cultural nuances, and have translations that include empathy and context to ensure the correct meaning is being communicated. This is in comparison with a program that only offers the straight translation of words, which can miss cultural context or meaning.

Unbabel offers integrations and APIs of the company's platform. This includes native integrations with platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Intercom. These integrations are intended to be flexible and allow users to keep their favorite customer support systems, marketing channels, and platforms and to interrupt a company's current workflow as little as possible.

Unbabel's platform has been used in industries as widespread as the gaming industry, financial technology, retail, traditional technology, and the travel industry.