(Berlin) DeepL, which develops a translation tool based on artificial intelligence (AI), announced on Wednesday a fundraising of 300 million dollars, valuing the young German company at 2 billion dollars.
The funding round led by Index Ventures will support DeepL’s “mission to transform the way businesses around the world communicate with each other,” the Cologne-based company said in a statement.
The new valuation makes DeepL the largest start-up of AI in Germany, according to the business daily Handelsblatt. DeepL is known for its AI-powered online translation service, available in 32 languages.
In addition to a free offering for short texts, DeepL also provides paid translation software for businesses and has over 100,000 paying customers.
Launched in 2017, DeepL was initially seen as a courageous rival to Google Translate before finding a place in the big leagues alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT amid the explosion of generative AI.
“The investment comes during DeepL’s most pivotal year to date, proving that our AI language technology plays a crucial role in overcoming the complex language challenges facing today’s global organizations,” founder and CEO Jaroslaw Kutylowski said in a statement.
ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, wowing the world with its human-like capabilities, from digesting complex texts to producing poems in seconds to passing medical exams.
Other examples of generative AI-based tools include DALL-E and Midjourney, which produce images, while others create sounds from simple everyday language input.