Machine translation is a breeding ground for our beloved memes that amuse us during work breaks. Although the internet provides us content from all over the world, we still cannot properly read the contents from machine translation.

Vasco Pedro being a philologist himself, noticed this glitch as his opportunity to provide better service. Thus, along with João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, Bruno Silva, and Hugo Silva, they tirelessly clung to the idea to mix human translation and better service until they got a homogeneous result.

After a year of only organizing the linguistic under layers of the human form of translations, Vasco’s team finally set their roots in Lisbon. Their final product, named Unbabel, is an AI-generated language platform that provides every customer in the world the chance to understand the contents of a foreign text in their native language and understand the idea in their mother tongues.

The journey to reach the final Unbabel destination tangled with hard work and multiple recognitions on their startup is more than a recommended entrepreneurial read, so let’s continue reading about detangling all the babel.

Fluent in both Human and Cyber Lingos

Vasco Pedro was born and raised in a family where linguistics ran in the blood of its members. Vasco’s mother was a linguistics professor, and she passed the linguistics genes onto her son. But, Vasco is a millennial child, which means he was born in an era where another language will be of utter importance ten years later, and that’s the programming language.

Vasco was a bright kid who started coding at the age of six. He was endlessly interested in programming and artificial intelligence that he would often stay at home instead of going out to play so he can study the computer insides. The same goes for the free time the young boy had. Vasco didn’t waste a spare second not using it on coding, so he even bought a spectrum 48k – coding game.

As he grew up, he became obsessed with building things, anything, really. It was just the pure joy of starting from putting the idea on paper, and the wonders that happen once you start analyzing that idea.

The Student Life Ep

Vasco’s Student Life Episode takes place in Lisbon, where he starts off his studies at the University of Lisbon in Language and Knowledge Engineering. He was dedicated to his studies and would spend time on internships to practice what he learned. Vasco’s hard work had finally paid off in 1999 when he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Science. But, his college journey didn’t end there.

In 2001 Vasco decided to enroll at Carnegie Mellon University’s Master’s program for Language technologies. Two years later, he got a master’s degree which enabled him to enlist for the Ph.D. studies, dedicating himself to studying Language Technologies until 2009 when he finally got his final written degree.

Straight after college, Vasco had the opportunity to work as an intern at Google, where he got assigned for product researching. Working for Google might be a prestigious destination for many because it’s the birthplace of the internet. However, although Vasco respected the work of Google, he felt like he’s another cog in the machine, which was not what he studied for. Besides, he loved to build things in the first place. Thus he sets himself on a startup journey.

Rolling up the Sleeves

After he finished the interns at Google, Vasco founded the next generation’s semantic advertising software for a company he co-founded – Bueda. However, this story didn’t end up well, and he had to move on from the startup experience. Afterward, Vasco got hooked on research about scale semantic social media content. A few years later, Vasco takes the plunge again and co-founds another company called Dezine. The main goal of the company was to focus on building the product. Unfortunately, although it might have been a good idea, it didn’t last long. After a year and so, the company was closed. It was a devasting period for the young Vasco. But, after all these bad experiences with the startups, Vasco realized one thing. It’s not that the idea doesn’t sell, but the team that doesn’t operate like one.

Shake It off and Try Again

Most people would stop founding after the first failure, persistent people would stop investing after the second failure, but entrepreneurs – they don’t stop. So is the case of Vasco. Led by the passion for languages and AI, Vasco wanted to enable everyone in the world to understand and be understood. Since the beginning, this innovative idea is doable, but it requires a lot of work in every sense of the world. Machine translation does offer a similar service but do you really need to google machine translation memes to get my point? Right. So, in that sense, Vasco had to go back and update the algorithms. To update machine translation into a natural vernacular-wise translation, Vasco had to include various information. The term is Deep Learning.

Deep learning requires tons of linguistic data to capture the vernacular language. This mission seems like wishing for world peace, but alpha-experts in each layer of this idea make everything possible. Still, having lame team players was something that nearly broke the entrepreneurial spirit in Vasco. Whether he decided up or go solo on this innovative plate leaves us no choice but to learn in the next paragraph.

Coming Back Stronger

Knowing that the more, the merrier doesn’t help in the founding team, he still decided to work with four other people with whom he was close. Those were João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, Bruno Silva, and Hugo Silva, and they really worked perfectly together. The team worked as one, although it was a crowded founding board. Truth be told, from time to time, they still had some troubles with each other. Nevertheless, everything seems normal as they had to work from 10 to 16 hours every day until they can stand on their feet. But, eventually, they ironed the wrinkles with understanding and pushing forward of the team.

Eventually, the team divided to work on the fundamental AI. One part of Unbabel worked on neural machine translation, whereas the other team tested the translation quality to a point when it’s good enough to substitute human translators. Vasco’s team worked on this mission tirelessly until they further developed the idea.

Scoring First Points

Just as Unbabel took its first steps in the world of translating, it came across some staggering competition coming from companies like Lokalise, Phrase, and Smartling, among others. But believing in the company’s potential and uniqueness, the five youngsters didn’t back down.

The demo version of the updates worked sufficiently and targeted two billion bilinguals or polyglots who owned a smart device. This is how they generated the information and provided optimized translation. The initial preparations began in 2013, but the official launch of the company took a year later.

The late spring of 2014 brought Unbabel an offer they’d hardly forget. Their idea started scoring points with the investors, but the interest investors had in this company was $1.5 million serious. These funds were enough to supply their initial costs and set the company off smoothly.

Growing Fast and Big

As 2015 unfolded, Unbabel got recognized for being the fastest-growing, seed-stage company by Y Combinator. Unbabel may have started slowly, but it gained popularity quickly. Thus, towards the end of 2016, Unababel got $5 million from the main backers - Notion Capital and Caixa Capital.

Unababel will remember 2018 for the first double figured raise of $23 million in Series B funding. Having Scale Venture Partners and Notion Capital behind their backs filled their pockets with $31.2 million.

Series C funding was also a good deal. On September 24, 2019, Unbabel raised $60 million to update and develop its AI and human translation platform. Nowadays, the total funding of Unbabel is over $91 million.

Although the team started with only five co-founders in five years, they gradually grew to 148 employees as they raised funding. The company didn’t spread only in terms of employees, but in cities, too. From the capital, Unbabel expanded to San Francisco, the hotspot for innovations and tech industries.

Unbabel Today

If the wish to provide a service to understand and be understood as a linear timeline, the realization was a Tivoli’s rollercoaster. In the end, everything pays off, especially once you know the world is happy to have your service.

Today, Vasco is running Unbabel as the co-founder and CEO, while João is the co-founder and CTO of the company. Sofia left Unbabel to begin another adventure, cofounding a company of her own. Bruno is still with Unbabel, leading the company as its Creative Director, while Hugo also remains with the company as the co-founder and full-stack developer.

Unbabel didn’t pass unseen among the giant platforms like Facebook, and Pinterest who gladly became their loyal customers. The Unbabel team’s hard work and persistence got crowned with lots of awards for the best translation platform, among which the most memorable was Y Combinator’s fastest-growing Seed stage companies.

So, next time you want to clear the language clutter, give Unbabel a go and enjoy your content in peace.