DeepL now worth one billion US dollars

The Cologne-based start-up is a competitor to Google Translate and now belongs to the league of unicorns.

The Cologne-based translation start-up DeepL has reached a valuation of one billion US dollars in a new round of financing and has officially joined the league of unicorns. This was reported by the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper, citing information from within the company. Among others, IVP and Bessemer are said to have invested. This is the first unicorn for Cologne.

The start-up has often flown under the radar until now because the founders do not make a big splash at start-up conferences. Yet the Cologne-based start-up's technology has it all: the translation software regularly beats competitors such as Google Translate in independent tests and is already considered by experts to be the better program.

The start-up's success began in 2009, when Linguee was founded in Cologne. Linguee is not a dictionary, but rather a search engine. For each translation, the program checks whether someone has already translated this or a similar sentence, for example in a legal text or in a multilingual company balance sheet. This translation is then displayed to the customer. The treasure trove of data that Linguee has collected over the years was later used to build DeepL, which was founded by Jaroslaw Kutylowski. The DeepL website went online in 2017, and a paid Pro version has been available since 2018.

The company grew quickly and was already in the black in 2013. Btov Partners and Benchmark invested. In 2021, the start-up doubled its workforce and became one of the top 100 websites worldwide. 400 employees now work for DeepL.