Lokalise

Overview

Lokalise is a localization-management software company founded in Riga, Latvia, in 2017 by Nick Ustinov (co-founder and CEO) and Petr Antropov (co-founder and chief revenue officer) (Tech.eu). Its platform helps companies manage and automate the translation of software, apps, websites, games and other digital assets — replacing the manual, file-based workflows that still dominate the industry (TechCrunch). At the time of its Series B in December 2021 the company described itself as Riga-founded and remote-first, serving more than 2,500 customers across 80 countries, including Revolut, Monday.com, BASF and Arduino (Tech.eu).

The bootstrap years, then venture capital on its own terms

What distinguishes Lokalise’s early history is how late it came to venture capital. The company was previously bootstrapped — it took no outside funding in its first years — and only raised a Series A in September 2020 after reaching $4 million in annual recurring revenue with 1,500 customers, among them Revolut, Yelp, Virgin Mobile and Notion (TechCrunch). That $6 million round, led by Mike Chalfen with participation from capital300 and a roster of high-profile angel investors including the founders of Miro, Algolia, Intercom and Tray, was reported at the time as one of the largest first-time investments into a Latvian-founded startup (TechCrunch).

The company’s core thesis was that localization remained a manual afterthought at most companies. Ustinov told TechCrunch that the most popular tools in localization processes were still Excel and Google Sheets, followed by internally built scripts — and that companies shipping frequent updates wasted time translating new buttons and text at the last minute (TechCrunch). Lokalise’s answer was a platform that plugs into existing toolchains: language files can be uploaded manually or pulled automatically from GitHub or GitLab, translators edit in a shared web interface with commenting, task assignment and review workflows, and finished translations are delivered to mobile apps via SDKs and an API (TechCrunch). The SaaS product generated about 90 percent of revenue, with a marketplace of professional translation services accounting for the rest (TechCrunch).

Barely a year after the Series A, Lokalise announced a $50 million Series B led by CRV, with Creandum, Dawn Capital and existing investors including Chalfen VC, 3VC and S16VC participating — bringing total funding to $56 million (Tech.eu). The company said it had more than tripled its annual recurring revenue since September 2020 and would use the money to accelerate hiring, product development and partnerships (Tech.eu).

The AI translation pivot

Lokalise’s most significant visible product move since the Series B came in 2023, with the launch of Lokalise AI, an AI-powered translation assistant built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 (MultiLingual). A private beta opened on March 27, 2023, offering features aimed squarely at the pain points of software localization: translating with added context (a short description fed to the translation engine), choosing among multiple translation variants, rephrasing existing translations, and shortening translations so they fit buttons and text fields without design changes (MultiLingual).

The product moved to general availability in September 2023 after closed beta testing, adding AI-generated translation quality-assurance reports with pass/fail scores so human language professionals could focus on critical errors, plus one-click SEO optimization for translated content (MultiLingual). By then Lokalise described itself as a fully remote company with more than 3,000 customers across 80 countries and over 50 integrations stitching localization into customer workflows (MultiLingual).

What this profile does not claim

• This profile does not state any funding total beyond December 2021. No independent press reporting of a later funding round was found; database aggregators suggest later activity, but without press verification it is not asserted here.
• The headcount and geographic-spread figures reported around the Series B (coverage of the company’s remote team could not be loaded in full) are deliberately omitted — no specific employee numbers are stated.
• The profile describes Lokalise as Riga-founded, Latvian and remote-first per the press record; company announcements are datelined Dover, Delaware, suggesting US incorporation, but no single headquarters is asserted.
• Feature claims about Lokalise AI rest on the company’s own announcements as republished by the language-industry trade press; independent testing or review of the tool’s quality was not found.
• Lokalise is not to be confused with similarly named services: this profile covers the continuous-localization platform founded in Riga in 2017 by Ustinov and Antropov, and no other company.