The Lithuania-based remote interpretation platform Interactio announced this morning that it has raised $30 million in series A funding, with investments from venture capital firms such as Eight Roads Ventures and Storm Ventures. The company claims this is the largest sum of series A funding in the remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) industry, noting that the money will ensure the company’s continued growth after a particularly big year during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to investing in new remote interpreting tools, the company plans to use the capital to expand its team by hiring new staff within its native country of Lithuania as well as across Europe and the United States.

Interactio, which was founded in 2014 in Vilnius, Lithuania, has provided RSI services for a wide host of international institutions and companies, including the United Nations, the European Commission, BMW, and JP Morgan, among others, allowing these groups to easily conduct remote or hybrid multilingual events and meetings.

“Our vision is to break down language barriers and make professional interpretation available to everyone,” said Henrikas Urbonas, chief executive officer and co-founder of Interactio. “It has been fantastic to support the world’s leading institutions and enterprises to operate on a full hybrid or remote basis.”

The company notes that it has seen a major increase in demand for its services, as a result of lockdowns and shelter-in-place measures during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which required many events and conferences to take place on remote platforms. Interactio grew 12-fold from 2019 to 2020; during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the company claims that it provided its RSI services for more than 18,000 meetings worldwide, with 390,000 viewers scattered across more than 70 countries. The European Commission’s Frédéric Pirotte said the pandemic was a major driving force in the institution’s decision to adopt Interactio as its RSI platform. 

“Since the pandemic hit the world, the directorate-general for interpretation of the European Commission had to go online for meetings with interpretation,” Pirotte said. “Thanks to its performance, user-friendliness and straightforward hybrid integration into our a/v infrastructure, Interactio became a platform of choice.”