Unbabel

Unbabel is a Portuguese platform founded in 2013 in Lisbon by Vasco Pedro, João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, and Bruno Prezado, with an original vision: combining artificial intelligence and human translators to deliver high-quality translations at machine speed and cost — the best of both worlds. The primary application is customer service: global companies with support operations across dozens of languages use Unbabel to handle interactions in languages their agents don't speak, without sacrificing the quality and tone customers expect. The system operates as a pipeline: machine translation (AI) produces a fast first version that is then refined by certified human translators working in post-editing mode — a process that delivers superior quality to MT alone but at times and costs incomparable to pure human translation. The result is translation SLAs compatible with real-time customer service requirements. Unbabel has raised over $90 million from investors including Notion Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Microsoft, and the Portuguese government (through Portugal Ventures), and has become one of the most visible success stories of the Portuguese tech ecosystem. It serves customers including Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies managing customer service operations in multilingual markets.