Last week, Unbabel announced it finalized the purchase of Lingo24, charting yet another acquisition in a busy year. MultiLingual reached out to Unbabel executives to talk more about the business decision. Unbabel CEO and co-founder Vasco Pedro shared his thoughts about the business deal, as well as what comes next.

MultiLingual: I gather the acquisition is spurred in part by the anticipated industry growth you mention in the press release? What else is Unbabel doing to meet that demand?

Vasco Pedro: As the demand for multilingual content and customer service grows, we are scaling our LangOps platform to meet and stay ahead of these needs.

LangOps is a unified approach that helps global businesses infuse language into every part of the enterprise, from marketing and sales to customer service and more. We’re seeing that businesses want to communicate trust more effectively with their customers and stakeholders in their native languages. To do this well and remove any friction from the process, we offer transparency and control over every aspect of language in an organization by breaking multilingual barriers and solving a key challenge to worldwide market expansion.

Our focus is building out the LangOps category to centralize and scale multilingual capabilities across our customer’s business. We want to replace the old, manual and fragmented approach — a complex mix of varied systems, agencies, and people — with LangOps, which will unify and manage their language strategy and unlock global business growth.

ML: What was the negotiation process like? How long did the deal take from the first approach to the finalization this week?

VP: We negotiated this deal in a way that was mutually beneficial to both companies, and aligned with our shared mission and values to provide consistent, high-quality multilingual customer experiences, accelerate international growth, and improve global customer satisfaction and loyalty. The process lasted four months, and resulted in a partnership that will be a mutually beneficial opportunity for both parties.

ML: Is there any other news Unbabel wants to share as it moves into a likely higher-demand 2022?

VP: Stay tuned for more news as our LangOps platform evolves, and we add more services around marketing content.

ML: Unbabel works with some massive companies. What are you hearing from those clients on the future of the natural language processing (NLP) industry?

VP: Our clients are focused on removing language barriers as we continue to help them do this by creating an AI-powered LangOps platform that can be integrated into every part of an enterprise.

ML: Anything else you want to share?

VP: We’re looking forward to the new year, and the new opportunities ahead as technology continues to evolve. For example, brands are moving into the metaverse, where borders won’t matter but language will. Every business wants to connect authentically with its customers in their native languages — to make sure they are heard and understood, no matter where or with whom the interactions take place. We want to allow businesses to do that seamlessly, in every language and environment.