Cloudwords, a service that connects translation vendors with content owners, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from several Salesforce executives and founders, including CEO Marc Benioff, founding CTO Dave Moellenhoff, current CTO Craig Weissman. Todd McKinnon, co-founder and CEO of cloud management service Okta, also contributed.
Probably not coincidentally, Cloudwords CTO Scott Yancey worked at Salesforce for nearly a decade before moving on to create this new startup with fellow co-founder and current CEO Michael Meinhardt.
I had a chance to catch up with both founders over the phone on Thursday afternoon to learn more about Cloudwords.
“Our goal is to become the Salesforce.com for the translation industry,” said Meinhardt, right off the bat.
Clarifying the analogy, Yancey explained that, in its early days, Salesforce helped clueless small companies define the sales process. Today, in an increasingly globalized market, small to medium-sized businesses know they need to translate their content and services, but they find it needlessly difficult to match translation vendors that meet their needs.
To that end, Cloudwords provides a marketplace for any of the 20,000 translation vendors worldwide to bid for projects from content owners. No matter whether it’s a website, a stack of documents, actual products or any other kind of translatable content, it qualifies as a project worth submitting to Cloudwords.
Meinhardt also made a point to say that Cloudwords distinguishes itself from services like Elance, which help content owners find freelance translators.
The company just launched two months ago, but has already picked up positive feedback from its earliest customers, like SuccessFactors, Veeva Systems, Calypso Technology and Coupa Software.
Both Meinhardt and Yancey insist that this is a huge market, estimated at about $20 billion and growing 15 percent every year.
“The world is getting smaller,” explained CTO Scott Yancey. “As a result, translation is only getting bigger and bigger, but it’s a highly fragmented industry.”
At the moment, Cloudwords remains laser-focused on reaching out to small and medium-sized software companies that need translation work done. As time goes on, the company has larger ambitions of entering new verticals and industries, as well as bringing its service to enterprise-grade clients.
The new funding will be used to expand the Cloudwords team and drive sales.
