Carnegie Mellon University
March 29, 2012

News Brief: LTI Spin-out Safaba Awarded $500,000 SBIR Grant

By Byron Spice

GreenlightingThe National Science Foundation has awarded a $500,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant to Safaba Translation Solutions LLC, a company spun out of the Language Technologies Institute.

Safaba will use the SBIR funding to gear up for its upcoming product launch. Founded by Alon Lavie, LTI associate research professor, and Robert Olszewski, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at CMU, the company is developing a software-as-a-service model that enables small- and medium-size language translation firms to take advantage of automated translation programs. Safaba software will help those companies expand their services and increase their productivity by incorporating machine translation tools that are customized to their needs.

"Safaba's solutions dramatically reduce translation workflow costs and turnaround time while delivering enterprise-quality results," said Lavie, Safaba's president and CEO. "Our ability to achieve these significant cost savings for our enterprise clients is a direct outcome of the research and development efforts undertaken by our team during our NSF SBIR Phase I grant and over the past year."

Safaba has received support from the School of Computer Science's Project Olympus and CMU's Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation, both part of CMU's Greenlighting Startups initiative, as well as the Idea Foundry and the Greater Oakland Keystone Innovation Zone.