#58 Smartling CEO Jack Welde, Lengoo and XTM Funding, Systran and TAUS

Smartling CEO Jack Welde joins the pod to talk about technology-enabled language services, scaling with fast-growing customers, the M&A and funding wave sweeping the translation management landscape.Jack shares why Smartling’s attitude towards machine translation shifted from “MT bad” in 2010 to fully embracing the technology in creating their own NMT engines in 2020. He also talks about his experience of running a 200-person company through a laptop in the era of Covid-19, and steering Smartling through its best-ever year in 2020. First up, Florian and Esther discuss the breaking news that UK-based TMS provider XTM has sold a majority stake to California-based investors K1.Florian talks about another language industry investment story, as Germany-based Lengoo announced they raised USD 20m in Series B funding based on an AI-agency investment thesis. The two discuss the recent MT Model Studio launch from machine translation provider SYSTRAN, which allows people to enhance existing MT models with their own bilingual or monolingual data, using SYSTRAN’s tech to clean and prep the data.Esther shares an update from Sweden-based media localization company Plint, which appointed Thomas Roberts as the new CEO in February 2021.