DeepL now worth one billion US dollars

The Cologne-based start-up is a competitor to Google Translator 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, officially joining the league of unicorns. This is reported by the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, citing information from the company's environment. Among others, IVP and Bessemer are said to have invested. For Cologne, it is the first unicorn.

So far, the start-up has often flown under the radar because its founders don't walk around start-up conferences with much media attention. Yet the Cologne-based startup's technology has it all: The translation software regularly beats competitors such as Google Translate in independent tests and is already considered the better program by experts.

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 looks to see 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. In 2017, the website of DeepL went online, and since 2018 there has also been a paid pro version.

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 was able to move into the top 100 websites worldwide. 400 employees now work for DeepL.