Japan crowd translation start-up raises $5.4m

SBI Investment, Mitsubishi UFG Capital, online crowd-sourcing platform CrowdWorks, internet service company Allied Architects, and Libertad all took part, as did existing investors Intel Capital, Iris Capital Management, STC Venture, and Infocomm Investments.

The company has raised over $24 million to date. It $12 million Series B round that took place in April 2013 was led by Intel, while 500 Startups and Atomico led the $5.3 million Series A in September 2011. Prior to that is raised over $1.5 million from various seed stage investors including Point Nine Capital and Kapor Capital.

The Tokyo-headquartered start-up was founded in 2008 and has an additional office in Silicon Valley. The Gengo platform has a community of nearly 15,000 translators from 144 countries offering low-cost crowd translation services across 37 languages and 63 language pairs. It claims to have translated content for the likes of travel review site TripAdvisor and Japanese e-commerce platform Rakuten.

In a release, Gengo said it intended to use the latest injection of capital to scale up its sales and marketing operations in existing and new markets. To coincide with the funding round Gengo co-founder Matthew Romaine will take on the role of CEO while former CEO Robert Laing will shift his role to special projects.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Venture
• Japan
• Technology
• Venture
• SBI Holdings
• Intel Capital