In recent months, artificial intelligence has been at the center of tech news, due to the emergence of ChatGPT. As a reminder, this chatbot was created by OpenAI and today it is considered a real threat to Google’s search engine. For its part, the German company DeepL is attacking Google Translate. And its main advantage is that its service claims a quality of translation superior to that of Google.
Very promising, the company DeepL is now a unicorn. Indeed, the TechCrunch site confirms that after a recent fundraising, DeepL is now valued at more than 1 billion euros (therefore, at more than 1 billion dollars). It’s unclear exactly how much DeepL raised to reach this valuation. Indeed, the company has decided not to communicate on this. But some media are talking about 100 million or 125 million dollars.
In any case, this new valuation reflects the progress made by the company which, according to TechCrunch, is showing 100% growth, and is on the verge of making a profit. Note that in its economic model, DeepL turns more to companies than to individuals. The translation service is free, but there is a “Pro” version which provides more options. Today, more than 500,000 “professionals” use DeepL to achieve better translations.
A unicorn that does better than Google
To distinguish itself from Google Translate, which is the reference of the internet, DeepL relies on security, but also on its artificial intelligence which, according to him, is able “to capture the slightest nuances and reproduce them in translation like no other service. ”. To check the quality of its translator compared to the competition, DeepL carried out blind tests. 119 paragraphs from different domains were translated with DeepL and other machine translators.
Comparison between DeepL and the competition, available on the company’s website. According to this: “Different systems translated a total of 119 paragraphs from various fields. External professional translators were tasked with evaluating these translations – without knowing which system had produced them. The graphs represent the preference given by the translators to each of the systems. These charts ignore cases where most systems produced translations deemed perfect. The tests were carried out in January 2020.” © DeepL
Then, professional (human) translators evaluated the quality of these translations, without knowing which service was used. According to DeepL, these tests showed that its AI is superior to the competition for translation from French to English or vice versa. DeepL would also be superior to Google Translate for translations between English and German or between English and Spanish. But of course, to confirm this yourself, the best thing is to test the product.
And DeepL continues to improve its AI, and can even afford to have more ambitious long-term projects. The advantage of this company is that it is already generating income, which encourages investors. But at the same time, she can afford to spend on research. 60 to 70% of DeepL’s workforce would be engineers.
