Lingua Custodia, the FinTech company specialized in AI and financial translation, announced a €1M fundraising operation to fuel its business development strategy in Europe. This brings the total amount of funds raised since its inception in 2011 to €2.4 million.
by: Silicon Luxembourg
photo: Luis Villasmil / Unsplash
While significant support was provided by Investessor, the French Business Angels’ network from which the company raised close to €300k, Lingua Custodia succeeded in this new round of funding due to continued confidence from existing shareholders and its ability to convince new French and European private investors.
Lingua Custodia was founded by former asset management professionals to solve the translation issues they experienced. They observed that finance professionals can spend up to 15% of their time translating texts that are too technical or urgent to be outsourced.
Thus came the idea of building machine translation engines specifically designed for the financial industry. The aim was twofold: cater to the full spectrum of industry needs and achieve superior translation quality with highly domain-focused deep learning algorithms. The result, as it turns out, is an estimated market potential of 1 billion euros in Europe alone.
After three years of research and development, the company brought its first engine to market at the end of 2014. It now offers a full range of services, with around 100 specialized engines available in 9 languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and more recently Chinese and Japanese.
“The combination of these elements – fundraising, quality of our research and technology – constitutes the basis on which we will be able to grow our position in Europe over the next 2 years, before turning to the Asian market”
The company presides over accounts with more than fifty clients, including heavyweights from the French and European banking industries.
Lingua Custodia offers three levels of services, all accessible via a secure web platform:
- A range of machine translation engines specialised by document type (fund prospectuses, annual reports, equity research, etc.)
- Customised machine translation engines which learn from the specific vocabulary used by financial institutions and personalise translations
- An innovative approach combining both artificial and human intelligence to deliver finalised, ready to use translations.
Lingua Custodia has consolidated the quality of its engines and successfully tested its business model in France and now intends to strongly accelerate its growth in the greater European market.
The funds raised are therefore reserved primarily to support the recruitment of a Luxembourg-based sales team, Lingua Custodia’s chosen market for the opening of its first overseas subsidiary, which is scheduled for September 2019. The funds will also be used to invest in Marketing and Customer Servicing tools to support the overall business growth plan.
“This fundraising is a milestone in Lingua Custodia’s development. It is a testament to the quality of our research and technology. The combination of these elements constitutes the basis on which we will be able to grow our position in Europe over the next 2 years, before turning to the Asian market,” concluded Olivier Debeugny, Founder and CEO of Lingua Custodia.
