Why we partner with Lokalise
We believe in entrepreneurs with big ideas and the willpower to execute them – to ultimately impact the world in a positive way. Just like the Lokalise team, who are on a mission to eliminate the hassle of localization by providing a platform to automate, integrate, and better manage translations of digital content into multiple languages. Localization - the process of adapting and translating digital content to local markets - removes borders and leads to more growth.
Eva Arh first met Lokalise founders Nick Ustinov, Petr Antropov and their stellar team in 2018. As a Latvian native Eva meets local start-ups regularly. Nick and Petr are serial tech entrepreneurs who started Lokalise out of necessity when they experienced the lack of a hassle-free solution to manage localisation in their previous ventures. They quickly built up a strong, product-focused team.
When they met with Eva, they considered raising seed capital after founding the startup in 2017. Over Coca-Cola in the Lokalise office, they discussed growth opportunities related to the product and the go-to-market strategy. Lokalise ended up not raising seed funds having a strong cash position through their impressive organic growth – early on a powerful signal of their financial strength and product-led growth. We stayed in touch and saw them grow from 10 to over 50 people and evolve organisationally and commercially, eager to partner up at the right moment.
Initially we were just a handful of coders building a product for a pain that we ourselves were experiencing. When top-tier customers started knocking on our doors we saw the larger opportunity at play.
Founder - Lokalise
Almost every company is a software company today with multiple digital assets (web and mobile apps, marketing content, IoT, games, etc.). It is key for any international business to connect with customers in their native language and culture, covering both linguistic and cultural adaptation such as dates and times, accounting standards, hand symbols, gestures, or signage. This is done by the process of “software localisation”.
Great user experience depends on how quickly a user can understand and interact with a given page, window, or screen. The more context and cultural familiarity a company can provide, the better value its product will have. With more languages, a company is able to reach more customers around the world. Reports show that app downloads in a respective country can more than double and revenues can grow by 26% once the content is being localised.
If done incorrectly, localisation can be a costly, painful, and tedious process for companies. The traditional “translator-centric” localisation approach (a waterfall process where local adaptation is performed manually using cumbersome excel files) is missing the product-centric nature of (digital) businesses.
This is where Lokalise comes in: using its platform businesses can simply integrate the localisation process in an agile, product-centric way. Lokalise pushes content directly to the software using powerful integrations to tools including Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Wordpress and Adobe XD. This automated, streamlined workflow enables engineers, managers, translators, and designers to seamlessly work together on multi-market products from prototype to production. Lokalise makes the localisation process a snap.
Lokalise‘s customer centricity and their commitment to build a best-in-class product that customers truly love impressed us. Talking to their customers, it became very clear to us that Lokalise is a game changer replacing a painful and costly process.
Partner at 3VC
Today, Lokalise has customers in 80 countries and is the preferred choice of more than 1500 businesses including Daimler, Virgin Mobile, Nestle, Bayer, Revolut, and many others. Customer’s trust and love for Lokalise’s solution supports our conviction that Lokalise can become the leading platform for localization – a market that will compound for years as the software economy continues to grow over the next decades.
We are proud and excited to partner up with the Lokalise team in making localization effortless in a strong setup with Chalfen Ventures by the experienced B2B software investor Mike Chalfen and high-profile angel investors including Andrey Khusid (Founder and CEO of Miro), Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-Founder of Algolia) and Des Traynor (Co-Founder and CSO of Intercom).
3 reasons why we partner with Lokalise
Category-defining product
Lokalise’s beautifully designed platform is a natural fit for software companies. Creators and developers can work with the software they know best through integrations to their favourite tools. We had the privilege of talking to Lokalise’s customers, both incumbents and scale ups, and heard only phenomenal reviews. Lokalise’s customer-centric solution is a game changer, replacing error-prone processes with a product-centric and flexible workflow. Through the broad and fast adoption by both large and small customers, Lokalise can become the default platform for localization.
Stellar product-obsessed team
Best products are built by people who solve a problem they know in-side-out. Founders Nick Ustinov and Petr Antropov are serial tech entrepreneurs who experienced the pain of localization and the lack of a great solution in their previous ventures. They have a big idea combined with the willpower to capitalise on their previous lessons learnt and to build a category defining, global company with Latvian roots. The whole team is laser-focused on the product and always hungry to learn and implement best practices as they grow the company. With the funding, Lokalise will hire top SaaS talent globally in order to further accelerate its growth as the company goes fully-remote.
Instinct for their right path to growth
Lokalise has always had a healthy and humble approach to growth. While bootstrapping, they have shown a very attractive product-led growth and exceptional SaaS unit economics, reaching a meaningful scale. What is more, COVID-19 has not impacted Lokalise showing the robustness and resilience of the business and team. Just three years after its inception, Lokalise has acquired more than 1500 customers across the globe. The decision to invest into a geographical team expansion and to make medium too long term product investments will further boost their growth.
