Safaba raises its first round led by Newlin Investment-Project Olympus - Carnegie Mellon University

Friday, August 23, 2013

Safaba raises its first round led by Newlin Investment

Squirrel Hill-based Safaba Translation Solutions LLC has closed on its first round of private equity funding with the investment led by Newlin Investment Co.and additional funds from early-stage investor Innovation Works.
The size of the round was not disclosed but for its part Innovation Works invested $100,000 this time around. The nonprofit investment group has a total of $300,000 invested in the company.
Safaba has about a dozen employees but this financing will be used to grow substantially, said Udi Hershkovich, vice president of business development. The company is focused in hiring expert technical staff to help push forward the product road map. There are plans to grow the marketing and sales team.

The company is developing machine translation technology that is aimed at corporate customers. The technology allows enterprise clients to automate the translation of digital content including websites, marketing material, software products, and customer communications.
“We are focusing just on making the text translation far beyond what people imagine,” Hershkovich said. Current development is on “advanced adaptation technologies” that allows the system to offer greater accuracy and fluency across applications. This means the software can learn a company’s specific vocabulary and style and bring it to different applications, whether its user-generated social media content or reviews. As part of this adaptation the technology can also learn a language so its use isn’t limited to a specific set of language pairs.

The company was founded in 2009 and for about two years was funded from support from the National Science Foundation as well as investment from Innovation Works. The company’s product hit the market in 2011. Two of the company’s high profile clients include PayPal and Dell Inc. Read More»

By: Malia Spencer, Pitttsburgh Business Times