Gengo was a web-based

translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...

platform headquartered in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

History

Gengo was founded in 2008 by Matthew Romaine and Robert Laing. Prior to starting Gengo, Romaine was an audio research engineer and translator with

Sony Corporation , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

, and Laing headed Moresided, a UK-based design agency. Romaine thought of the concept for Gengo due to his experience being asked to translate documents in Japanese and English at Sony, despite originally being hired as an engineer. Prior to its early 2012 rebranding, the company was known as "myGengo." In April 2010, the company launched their API, allowing developers to integrate Gengo’s translation platform into third-party applications, web sites and widgets. Romaine initially served as CTO of the company. He replaced fellow co-founder Robert Laing as CEO in 2015. In March 2018, the company launched Gengo AI, an on-demand platform that provides crowdsourced multilingual training data to machine learning developers. In January 2019, Gengo and Gengo AI were acquired by

Lionbridge Lionbridge Technologies, Inc is an American company that provides translation and localization services. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company has operations in 26 countries. History Lionbridge was founded in 1996. In 2005, they acquired B ...

Technologies and is being rebranded to Lionbridge AI.

Funding

The company's initial $750,000

seed investment Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' su ...

round concluded in September 2010. Investors included

Dave McClure David "Dave" McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded the business accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global), serving as CEO until his resignation in 2017. He founded Practical Venture Capita ...

500 Startups 500 Global (previously 500 Startups) is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California ...

last.fm Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...

founder Felix Miller, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Brian Nelson (CEO at Japan-based ValueCommerce),

Pageflakes Pageflakes was an Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal similar to Netvibes, My Yahoo!, Myhomepage, iGoogle, and Microsoft Live that operated from 2005 until January 2012. The site was organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected ...

co-founder Christoph Janz, Benjamin Joffe (CEO at China-based Plus Eight Star), and a number of Japanese

angel investors An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

. This was followed by a further seed funding round of around $1,000,000 in mid-2011. A $5.25 million

Series A round A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

led by Atomico and joined by

ended in September 2011, followed by an early 2013 Series B investment of $12 million led by

Intel Capital Intel Capital is a division of Intel Corporation, set up to manage corporate venture capital, global investment, mergers and acquisitions. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies offering hardware, s ...

. The company announced its $5.4 million Series C round funding in April 2015.

References

{{Reflist Crowdsourcing Outsourcing companies Translation websites Freelance marketplace websites 500 Startups companies Online marketplaces of Japan