Localisation is a great way to establish oneself as a trusted entity, be it for a small company or a global business. Conglomerates such as Amazon and Google localise their service to better serve their consumers and increase their reach and similarly, there are companies that provide such services to others. The Latvian localisation software startup, Lokalise, is one such startup that has established itself in the field and has now raised a whopping €5.07M in Series A funding round.
Time to hire top talent
Lokalise was founded in 2017 in Riga, Latvia by tech entrepreneurs Petr Antropov and Nick Ustinov. After working as a bootstrapped company since its inception, the startup realised its potential to grow faster and hence secured €5.07M in Series A funding round. The amount raised is said to be the largest ever first-time investment for a Latvian-founded startup. External funding will now be used to hire top SaaS talents globally and to accelerate the company’s growth as it goes fully remote.
The Series A funding round for the company was led by one of Europe’s most experienced VCs, Mike Chalfen, with participation from capital300. Additionally, a number of high-profile angel investors such as Andrey Khusid (Founder and CEO of Miro) and his angel fund S16, Nicolas Dessaigne (co-founder of Algolia), Des Traynor (co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom), Matt Robinson(CEO of Nested), Rich Waldron, Ali Russell, and Dom Lewis (the founders of Tray), Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (COO of GoCardless), Eugene Katz (ex-CS lead of Atlassian), Stephane Kurgan (the former COO of King.com) and Charlie Songhurst participated as well.
Nick Ustinov, CEO and co-founder said: “Initially we were just a handful of coders building a product for a pain that we ourselves were experiencing. When top-tier customers started knocking on our doors we saw the larger opportunity at play. We quickly realized that the greatest challenge to scale Lokalise is in attracting the best go-to-market talent. Having met good VCs in both Europe and the US, we are happy that we picked Mike Chalfen as our partner to realize our vision.”
Automated and streamlined localisation
Lokalise offers a platform to manage localisation and this entails the process of translating and adapting content for local markets. Softwares, apps, websites and other digital assets are covered by the startup. Translation, generally, is done manually via cumbersome excel files.
However, Lokalise pushes the content directly to its software solution that automates and streamlines this flow, enabling engineers, managers, translators, and designers to seamlessly work together on multi-market products from prototype to production. It also uses APIs, SDKs, and plug-and-play connectors that automate data input from prototyping platforms to the live end-product.
The company also switched to a fully-remote operation in March 2020, after experimenting with it in Q4 2019. This move also enabled them to recruit global talent. In three years the startup has grown to 60 employees, with thousands of customers from over 80 countries ranging from startups to Fortune500 companies.
Image credits: Lokalise
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