BLEND Raises $10M to Fuel Global Growth with AI-Powered End-to-End Localization Services
TEL AVIV, Israel and LOS ANGELES, March 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BLEND (formerly OneHourTranslation), an end-to-end technology-based multi-market enabler, announced the completion of a $10 million funding round to fuel its continued rapid growth. Existing investor Fortissimo Capital led the round following a year of strategic expansion reflected in the company's new brand and offering. BLEND leverages OneHourTranslation's AI-driven language technology, 25,000 expert linguists, and advanced tech stack to help global brands establish a native presence in fundamentally different markets, worldwide.
BLEND helps brands localize their business offerings based on a unique understanding of local context, culture, and consumer behavior. The company provides customers with a comprehensive platform, offering localization services such as content translation and transformation, global marketing, regulatory services, and more. The company will continue to operate from its offices in Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Kyiv, and Bucharest.
BLEND is founded upon three core pillars: a strong global community of linguists, powerful AI-driven Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, and premium customer service led by experienced localization managers. BLEND's technology stack includes custom integrations with Google Cloud Translation, Amazon Translate, ModernMT, SYSTRAN, KantanMT, DeepLPro, and other neural machine translation (NMT) engines, as well as a wide selection of TMS integrations and customized API driven workflows.
The company's long-standing on-demand translation wizard will remain active under the onehourtranslation.com domain, while the company's new website and localization services for businesses and enterprise companies can be found on www.getblend.com.
According to Yair Tal, BLEND's CEO, "We're introducing BLEND to empower enterprise companies to become natively local, and blend into new markets in order to truly stand out. BLEND serves as a partner in helping midsize to enterprise companies make that 'glocal' transition. The ongoing support of our investors and loyal customers, along with the new funds, allow us to address the growing demand for localization services and accelerate our growth both organically and through acquisitions."
To support multi-market expansion at scale, companies need to translate massive volumes of content into dozens of languages quickly. The BLEND platform was designed to handle thousands of projects simultaneously, using data to allocate linguists for different localization tasks, such as translation, voiceover, transcription, linguistic testing, DTP, and many other tasks.
BLEND is also used by top AI technology providers to produce multilingual data for AI model training. Workflows are customized to match each client's localization challenges, KPIs, and time-to-market. By using the BLEND platform, clients leverage the latest AI translation technologies, trained with their past translation data. As a result, BLEND's clients benefit from faster time-to-market, higher quality, and reduced cost of ownership.
BLEND's strategic transition is led by newly appointed CEO Yair Tal, who joined the company after serving as Senior Vice President, Head of Payoneer Enterprise at Payoneer, a leading cross-border payment platform. Yair played a key role in growing Payoneer from a small payment startup to one of the world's largest e-payment solution providers. Recent additions to BLEND's leadership and management team include domain experts from leading unicorn companies, such as Fiverr, Wix, IronSource, MyHeritage, Welocalize, AWS, and Payoneer.
Yuval Cohen, founding partner at Fortissimo Capital, noted: "The impressive and ongoing global growth of the company, alongside the strategic vision led by the new CEO Yair Tal, have led us to decide on an additional investment that will keep positioning us as BLEND's primary investor."
About Fortissimo Capital
Fortissimo Capital Fund is a private equity group, established in 2004, that invests primarily in technology and industrial companies at a point of inflection and works closely with management to expedite growth. Fortissimo raised $1.6 billion across five funds and has invested in close to 50 companies. A few notable portfolio companies include: Priority Software, SodaStream (Nasdaq:SODA, later sold to Pepsi), Kornit Digital (Nasdaq:KRNT), Tuttnauer, Cadent (sold to Align), Sanquin Plasma, AOD (sold to Primus), Biological Industries (sold to Sartorius), and Gadot Biochemicals.
For more details visit getblend.com.
Watch our launch video here.
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SOURCE BLEND
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