Lionbridge Augments Artificial Intelligence Offering Through Acquisition of Gengo and Gengo.ai
Lionbridge expands Japanese market footprint with strategic purchase of innovative technology company
Jan 16, 2019, 09:00 ET
WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Lionbridge, one of the world's most trusted global communications platforms, announced its acquisition of Gengo, a Tokyo-based, leading edge technology company providing crowdsourcing, machine learning and localization services to global customers.
Lionbridge has a 20-year history of leveraging its 500,000 linguistic experts to help the world's largest companies expand their businesses on the global stage by providing machine learning data to make their platforms and products smarter and create content for a variety of industries.
The acquisition of Gengo will strengthen Lionbridge's position in the machine learning and content relevance markets. This purchase includes Gengo.ai, the company's platform that provides AI training-data services delivered by a fast and efficient crowdsourced network of highly specialized contributors.
"Gengo is a key acquisition for us that immediately complements our core strategic initiatives," said John Fennelly, Lionbridge CEO. "It will accelerate our ability to penetrate new markets in the artificial intelligence space; it bolsters our human capital pool by bringing an extremely talented team assembled by Matthew Romaine into our company; and Gengo's advanced technology platform will become a key part of our localization delivery system. In addition to those very tangible benefits, we'll add to our already formidable capabilities in Asia, and this will give us a deeper set of technology tools to increase our market share in the local games and life sciences markets."
Gengo was founded in 2008 and has been a pioneer in bringing automation and advanced technology solutions to the localization industry. Gengo was co-founded by Matthew Romaine and has grown steadily under the leadership of executives from technology giants like Uber, Yahoo! and Sony. Since its inception, Gengo has worked with companies like BuzzFeed, TripAdvisor, Eventbrite, and major ecommerce and travel businesses on translation and localization projects of all sizes.
"The Gengo team is eager to begin working with Lionbridge and expand the capabilities, efficiency, and quality that customers have come to expect from Lionbridge," said Matthew Romaine, co-founder and CEO of Gengo. "Together we will be able to expand the scope of our industry by helping to bring new technologies to global markets."
Charly Walther, Gengo's VP of Product and Growth said, "The demand for machine learning training data and validation services will continue to grow significantly. Lionbridge's linguistic experts, matched with Gengo's existing crowd and technology platform, will bring a first-choice solution for AI development to this growing market."
Romaine and the rest of the Gengo team will join Lionbridge post transaction and assume key leadership roles in the company.
This is another strategic step in deepening Lionbridge's specialty offerings under the company's new brand, furthering its role as a trusted leader in the translation and localization marketplace for companies in gaming, life sciences and more.
The acquisition is the first for the company following H.I.G. Capital's purchase of Lionbridge in May 2017. The purchase amount was not disclosed.
About Lionbridge
Lionbridge partners with brands to break barriers and build bridges all over the world. For more than 20 years, we have helped companies connect with global customers by delivering marketing, testing and globalization services in more than 300 languages. Through our world-class platform, we orchestrate a network of 500,000 passionate experts who partner with brands to create culturally rich experiences. Relentless in our love of linguistics, we use the best of human and machine intelligence to forge understanding that resonates with our customers' customers. Based in Waltham, Mass., Lionbridge maintains solution centers in 27 countries. Learn more at www.lionbridge.com.
About Gengo
Gengo, a Lionbridge company, is a global people-powered technology platform providing translation and AI training-data services to global businesses. Founded in 2008, Gengo has translated more than one billion words for 65,000+ customers. Gengo's professional human-powered platform brought a huge leap in efficiency, scale, and speed to the translation and AI training-data markets. Gengo was previously based in Tokyo with offices in San Mateo, Calif., London, and Manila. Gengo has raised $26M in venture funding from investors that include Intel Capital and Atomico; the company was purchased by Lionbridge in December 2018. To learn more, visit https://gengo.com and https://gengo.ai.
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SOURCE Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.