It's the classic „David versus Goliath“ story that has brought the Cologne-based translation start-up DeepL a great deal of attention in recent years. Having emerged from the translation service Linguee in 2017, the company, which only had a few employees at the time, took on none other than the overpowering big tech competition from the USA. Google and Microsoft had already been offering their own translation service for a long time, and were each valued at around 600 billion dollars on the stock market.

It came as a surprise when the tool from DeepL quickly became regarded as superior by experts. „A German AI translates better than Google & Co“ was the headline of the B2B platform „Springer Professional“. „DeepL's AI often outperforms Google's“, read an article from the University of Strasbourg. And earlier this year, the translation platform Centus concluded in a meta-analysis that DeepL outperforms „almost all other translation solutions“.

An important reason for the high precision of DeepL translations is the online dictionary Linguee. It contains billions of translations with which the Cologne-based company's software has been fed and trained. Linguee was launched back in 2009. The current CEO and founder of DeepL, Jaroslaw Kutylowski, joined the Cologne-based company in 2012 as Head of Technology.

Around five years later, the Polish-born computer scientist launched DeepL as the successor to Linguee. The company name is an abbreviation for „deep learning“, which refers to a sub-area of machine learning. This involves simulating the complex decision-making structures of the human brain. To do this, DeepL uses so-called neural networks, which learn independently and based on the Linguee database how to translate grammatically correctly. Human experts also help to improve the language models of DeepL.

The technology has brought the company strong growth in recent years. Turnover doubled in both 2021 and 2022 – most recently to around 55 million euros. More than 200,000 companies, authorities and other organisations worldwide now use the translation tools from DeepL. The team has grown from around 20 people at the beginning to over 1,000 employees.

Some of these were added following the latest financing round. In May 2024, DeepL raised 300 million dollars from renowned venture capitalists such as Index Ventures from London, and Iconiq Growth from San Francisco. The venture arm of the Canadian teachers' pension fund OTPP – one of the largest pension funds in the world – also participated in the round. The Cologne-based company was valued at 2 billion dollars in the deal, for which it receives the Börsen-Zeitung Corporate Finance Award in the „Digital“ category. This represents a doubling in value compared to the previous financing round, which took place at the beginning of 2023.

Index investor Danny Rimer praised DeepL in the course of the latest deal for the „very well thought-out“ development of innovative AI products. In his view, the success is due to the fact that Kutylowski and the DeepL team „always consider research and commercial success equally“.

Index Ventures is known for its investments in the Californian office chat provider Slack, and the Israeli cyber security company Wiz, among others. Both companies were successfully sold to large US tech groups for tends of billions: Slack went to the US cloud software provider Salesforce for 28 billion dollars at the end of 2020, while Wiz is soon to be acquired by Google for 32 billion dollars. This is the largest takeover in the history of both tech companies.

Kutylowski did not want to answer how much money Google would now have to offer for DeepL in an interview with „Wirtschaftswoche“ last year. However, the CEO told the online marketing platform OMR a few months later that his company „actually feels quite good" being independent. That is why he is also considering an IPO for DeepL. The online magazine „Sifted“ reported at the beginning of April, citing insiders, that the start-up could take this step as early as the end of this year, or next year.