Artificial intelligence
German AI pioneer DeepL valued at two billion
With the fresh money from the financing round, the Cologne start-up is valued at two billion US dollars. photo
© Christoph Dernbach/dpa
The German start-up DeepL has so far been able to hold its own against major competition from the USA. Now fresh money is intended to secure the growth of the most valuable AI start-up in Germany.
The German translation specialist DeepL receives 300 million from international investors US dollars (276.8 million euros) to finance the company’s further growth. The company announced this.
DeepL is one of the world’s leading providers of AI language technology and has had to compete with its translation app in the past, especially against Google Translate. The world’s leading AI start-up OpenAI with ChatGPT is currently considered the main competitor. In addition to a free offer for short text translations, DeepL also offers a paid translation solution for companies and organizations that need to translate a lot and want to protect their data.
“Rapid growth in over 60 markets”
With the fresh money from the financing round, the Cologne start-up is valued at two billion US dollars (1.85 billion euros). The round is led by Index Ventures. In addition, ICONIQ Growth and Teachers’ Venture Growth as well as existing investors IVP, Atomico and WiL are also participating in the financing round. Due to high demand from corporate customers, DeepL is recording “rapid growth in over 60 markets” and covers 32 languages. Over 100,000 companies, governments and other organizations now use the software from Cologne, including Deutsche Bahn.
Germany’s most valuable AI start-up recently expanded its product portfolio to include a writing assistant with artificial intelligence. The new product DeepL Write Pro is the company’s first product that is based on its own large AI language model (Large Language Model or LLM). LLM are machine learning models that are trained to understand and generate human language. Well-known LLMs are GPT from OpenAI, Gemini from Google or Llama from the Facebook group Meta.