From left: Petr Antropov and Nick Ustinov. Image: Lokalise
Lokalise, a Riga-based localisation technology company that counts Revolut and Virgin Mobile among its customers, has raised $6m in its first funding round.
On Monday (7 September), Latvian localisation business Lokalise announced that it has raised $6m in Series A funding. The company said that the investment will help it to hire global SaaS talent to accelerate its growth as it becomes a fully-remote business.
The funding round was led by venture capitalist Mike Chalfen, with participation from Capital300 and a number of angel investors. This included Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid and his angel fund S16, and Intercom co-founder and chief strategy officer Des Traynor.
Founded in 2017 in Riga, Lokalise is led by entrepreneurs Petr Antropov and Nick Ustinov. The start-up has attracted customers in 80 countries, from early-stage businesses to companies such as Revolut, Yelp, Virgin Mobile and Notion.
Commenting on the funding, Lokalise CEO Ustinov 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 largest opportunity at play.
“We quickly realised 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 realise our vision.”
Lokalise’s product
The start-up has built a cloud-based platform to manage localisation, which is the process of adapting and translating content to local markets. Lokalise provides its services to software, apps, websites and other digital assets.
It describes its product as having an “automated and streamlined flow” that allows engineers, managers, translators and designers to work together on multi-market products from prototype to production.
The company automates data from prototyping platforms to live end-products through APIs, SDKs and plug-and-play connectors. In three years, the firm has grown to 60 employees.
Within the Lokalise team, the company began experimenting with remote working in the final quarter of 2019, before switching to a fully-remote operation in March 2020, opening the opportunity to recruit talent anywhere in the world.
Commenting on the company’s localisation platform, lead investor Chalfen said: “Every business has an online presence, yet inefficient localisation remains a painful barrier to geographic expansion. Lokalise changes that. It has amazing customer references. Its beautifully designed collaborative tool and powerful integrations position it to disrupt the industry’s complex and archaic business processes.”
