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Intel Capital recently led a $12M round of funding in Gengo, a crowd-sourced translation services platform, along with participation from Atomico (returning investor), Infocomm Investments, NTT-IP Fund, in addition to STC Ventures and Iris Capital.

Founded in 2009 in Tokyo, Gengo provides an API and platform for human translation for 33 languages provided by a pool of over 7,500 rated translators targeting global large and small-and-medium-sized companies in e-commerce, online travel, and community portals as well as individuals. The service also recently partnered with YouTube, enabling video uploaders to order professional-quality translation for their captions.

With this new round of financing, Gengo says it will accelerate global expansion, while also improving the translation platform and increasing the speed of the translation process.

Regional investment fund STC Ventures and its parent fund manager Iris Capital partook in the deal.

“Naturally we’ll be looking to introduce Gengo wherever possible to potential relevant partners in the region (…) their offering being relevant to multiple players that might have a heavy online content translation requirements,” commented Angus Paterson, Partner at STC Ventures.

These relevant players could include e-commerce players looking to localize product descriptions from the electronics or fashion industries for example, online travel players such as travel review or booking sites, or media companies with multiple online language publishing requirements, e.g. TV program guides & reviews or online publishers according to Angus.

Angus also explained that this type of deal is part of STC Ventures’ scope and vision, and that “they’ll be looking to do more such deals.”

The introduction of Gengo to the market will certainly heat up the competition with Dubai based startup Qordoba offering similar services.

This is the 2nd investment by STC Ventures/Iris Capital this month. The firms had previously announced acquiring a minority stake in e-learning solutions providers Acadox.

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