In today’s rapidly growing digital world, companies are developing various virtual solutions, services, games, and more, to occupy and improve the current virtual landscape. We all may take it for granted that an app developed in a Hebrew speaking country like Israel can be localized into hundreds of different languages to meet user experience and convenience. The need for fast paced localization tools continues to grow with enterprises accelerating global product expansion.
BLEND, an Israeli startup enabling multi-market localization technologies, announced the completion of a $10 million funding round, led by existing investor Fortissimo Capital. Formerly OneHourTranslation, the company also announced its rebrand into BLEND.
Former Payoneer SVP turns BLEND CEO
The BLEND platform will look to leverage OneHourTranslation’s AI-powered language tech and army of 25,000 expert linguists, to help global brands localize their business content for global markets. The technology combines a unique understanding of local context, culture, and consumer behavior, and NLP technologies, with localization services, such as content translation and transformation, global marketing, regulatory services, and more.
From voiceovers and transcriptions to linguistic testing and DTP, the BLEND technology helps not only bridge product to consumer, but essentially puts the consumer and their culture and language in the center, understanding that a “simple” change in language can be enough to tilt consumer decision making. In addition, the platform is being utilized by leading AI technology providers to help produce multilingual data for AI model training. Workflows are customized to match each client's localization challenges, KPIs, and time-to-market. The company reports that clients using BLEND technology can leverage the latest AI translation technologies, trained with their past translation data. As a result, BLEND’s clients benefit from faster time-to-market, higher quality, and reduced cost of ownership.
BLEND’s technology stack includes custom integrations with Google Cloud Translation, Amazon Translate, ModernMT, SYSTRAN, KantanMT, DeepLPro, and other neural machine translation (NMT) engines, as well as a wide selection of TMS integrations and customized API driven workflows. The company’s long-standing on-demand translation wizard will remain active under the onehourtranslation.com domain. The company will continue to operate from its offices in Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Kyiv, and Bucharest.
“We’re introducing BLEND to empower enterprise companies to become natively local, and blend into new markets in order to truly stand out. BLEND serves as a partner in helping midsize to enterprise companies make that ‘glocal’ transition. The ongoing support of our investors and loyal customers, along with the new funds, allow us to address the growing demand for localization services and accelerate our growth both organically and through acquisitions,” said newly appointed CEO Yair Tal, who previously served as SVP, Head of Payoneer Enterprise, growing with the startup from a small Fintech startup into a publicly traded Unicorn.
Yuval Cohen, founding partner at Fortissimo Capital, noted: “The impressive and ongoing global growth of the company, alongside the strategic vision led by the new CEO Yair Tal, have led us to decide on an additional investment that will keep positioning us as BLEND’s primary investor.”
