Sweden-based localization company LocalizeDirect just announced an investment of SEK10,264,530 ($1,130,802). The investment comes from Entreprenörinvest, owned by The IKEA Family Foundation, and a number of Swedish venture capital firms and private individuals, including Innovum Invest. Former investors also participated in the financing round. Jan Andersson, a founder and former CEO of ReadSoft (now Kofax), will join LocalizeDirect’s board of directors.
LocalizeDirect is a Swedish localization and technology company. Founded in 2009, it now provides game translation, localization quality assurance, and content management system (CMS) services for the game development industry in over 65 language pairs. Entreprenörinvest is wholly owned by The IKEA Family Foundation. It specializes in investments into small- and medium-sized enterprises outside metropolitan areas of Sweden. Innovum Invest is based in Helsingborg and provides capital, networks and expertise for Southern Swedish companies.
The funding will support the launch and development of Gridly, a collaborative headless CMS for multilingual game projects.
“The trend we’ve seen for the last few years is a shift to a continuous development of games — games as a service. Instead of a one-time launch, developers now push out new content frequently, often on a weekly basis, in multiple languages. Managing game data (such as strings, IAP, gameplay variables) for agile multiplatform and multilanguage releases is time-consuming and can rapidly spiral out of control. Gridly facilitates this process, allowing the product teams to cooperate more efficiently time- and cost-wise,” says LocalizeDirect’s managing director, Christoffer Nilsson.
Gridly has an open API, spreadsheet UI and features version control, branching, granular user access control and localization support. LocalizeDirect offers development companies plans depending on their project’s sizes, starting with a free tier.
“The demand for agile, high-quality localization technology and services will continue to grow. It is already a key success factor in the game industry, but it is evident that the need for localization also grows fast in many other areas. LocalizeDirect is very well positioned to grow in this market and Gridly has the potential to become the preferred solution for many companies in many industries,” Jan Andersson, the Board Member of Entreprenörinvest and Innovum Invest underlines.
Gridly is currently in beta and will be released in September 2020.
