The AI global-content platform rebuilding the translation agency as software - and paying half a million linguists through one invoice.
Most companies still translate content the way they did twenty years ago: source a freelancer, email files back and forth, wait, and settle an invoice. Smartcat's argument is that the whole chain can be software.
Founded in 2016, Smartcat is a cloud platform that lets teams create, translate, and localize content in more than 280 languages. It fuses three things that usually live in separate tools - a translation management system, a collaborative editor, and machine translation - then adds a matching engine that decides which AI model is best suited to each piece of content. When a passage needs a human touch, the same platform routes it to a marketplace of over 500,000 professional linguists, and handles their contracts and payments too.
The company was incorporated in Delaware and runs from Boston, but it is fully remote and globally distributed - fitting for a business whose product is erasing the friction of language across borders.
"I founded Smartcat to reinvent the traditional translation agency model, which is based on a time-consuming, manually operated, long supply chain."
Ivan Smolnikov, CEO & Co-FounderIvan Smolnikov did not start in software. He began as a physicist at the Fiber Optics Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, researching the materials that carry light through glass.
After the lab, he moved into the language industry, co-founding and running ABBYY Language Solutions and growing it into one of the world's larger language-service providers. Around 2013 he started building Smartcat as an internal project to fix the limits of the translation tools of the day. Recognizing it was bigger than a side feature, he spun it out as an independent company in 2016.
That background shows up in the product: a bias toward measurement, model quality, and treating translation as an engineering problem rather than a purely creative craft.
Smartcat's suite spans three layers - a core platform, AI translation, and a human marketplace - now topped by AI Agents that stitch the work together.
A translation management system with a dual-column editor and real-time multiplayer editing - like Google Docs for translators - plus translation memory and glossary management.
Routes each job to the best-suited AI model and lets customers choose AI-only, human, or hybrid output with professional editing.
AI-sourced specialists hired under one contract and paid via a single monthly invoice - a 0% marketplace fee for enterprise hires.
Expert-enabled agents that create, translate, and localize at the same time, tuned to a brand's voice through a no-code Agent Builder.
Audio translation and AI voiceover generation from audio or subtitle files, producing localized voice tracks in multiple languages.
Figma, Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Contentful, WordPress and more, for continuous website and app localization.
More than 1,000 companies - and roughly 20% of the Fortune 500 - run global content on Smartcat, alongside 500,000+ registered linguists in over 100 countries.
Buyers span marketing, product, engineering, and learning-and-development teams. Smartcat reports that Fortune 1000 customers have seen productivity gains of more than 100% after consolidating localization onto the platform.
Smartcat sells subscriptions to the platform - per-seat and enterprise tiers with unlimited users, languages, and projects - and takes a cut of marketplace work.
Translators pay roughly a 2-8% commission depending on volume and geography, while enterprises can hire marketplace contractors at a 0% fee. Larger customers can pay for in-house AI model fine-tuning on their own phrase databases. Estimated annual revenue sits around $51.8M.
In the market, Smartcat competes with enterprise localization platforms such as Lokalise, Phrase, Transifex, Crowdin, RWS/Trados, Weglot, and Unbabel, and sits above general machine-translation engines like DeepL and Google Translate by orchestrating many models and adding human review, workflow, and payments.
Ivan Smolnikov starts building Smartcat to fix the limits of existing translation technology.
Smartcat becomes a standalone company, raising $2.8M from investor Ilya Shirokov.
Roughly $7M funds the cloud platform and marketplace.
A $14.6M round backs enterprise expansion.
Left Lane Capital leads the round, lifting total funding to about $70M.
Expert-enabled AI Agents, a no-code Agent Builder, video localization, and end-to-end SCORM translation ship.
Product walkthroughs and founder conversations. Links open on the respective platforms.
It is an AI-powered global content platform for creating, translating, and localizing content in 280+ languages - combining a translation management system, a collaborative editor, AI translation, and a marketplace of professional linguists.
Ivan Smolnikov, a former physicist and ABBYY Language Solutions CEO. It began as an internal project around 2013 and spun out as an independent company in 2016.
About $70M total, including a $43M Series C led by Left Lane Capital announced in September 2024.
More than 1,000 companies, including roughly 20% of the Fortune 500 - such as Volvo, ByteDance, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM - plus 500,000+ registered linguists across 100+ countries.
Instead of a single engine, Smartcat orchestrates the best AI model per job and adds human review, translation memory, workflow automation, and enterprise integrations for end-to-end localization.