Intel Capital-Backed Lilt Raises $25M Series B To Expand AI-Powered Translation Technology

After trying out Lilt’s artificial intelligence-powered enterprise translation software, Intel Capital is now investing in the San Francisco-based company.

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Intel led a $25 million Series B round of funding with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, In-Q-Tel and XSeed Capital. With this new funding, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since the company’s inception in 2015. Sequoia led a $9.5 million Series A round of funding in October 2018.

“By enabling the organizations that create and manage knowledge to make it available to more people in more languages, we can achieve our mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone regardless of where they were born or which language they speak,” Lilt CEO and co-founder Spence Green said in a written statement. “We’re excited to have Intel Capital as an investor and excited to have an industry-leader like Intel Corporation as a customer that recognizes the power of our technology.”

As part of the investment, Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, joins Lilt’s board of directors.

Lilt’s solution combines adaptive neural machine translation technology, an enterprise translation management system, and professional translators so organizations can scale their translation programs, go-to-market faster and improve the global customer experience, according to the company’s written statement.

“We have been looking for an innovative provider that can help us achieve short-term productivity gains, simplify our language technology solutions and leverage artificial intelligence to reinvent the way we approach localization in the long-term,” Loïc Dufresne de Virel, manager of Intel’s in-house localization team, said in a written statement. “Lilt met the criteria we had been searching for and presents new opportunities to explore the benefits of their adaptive neural MT solution running on Intel CPUs. This is an interesting use case and application of machine learning.”

The funding infusion for Lilt comes on the heels of another Intel investment. It led an $11.5 million Series A round for Hypersonix, an AI-driven company that helps businesses better analyze consumer commerce data, according to Crunchbase data.

Meanwhile, Lilt plans to use funds from the Series B for additional development in the company’s enterprise translation software and further research in its natural language processing technology, as well as accelerate its go-to-market strategy.

Illustration: iStock