French startup Weglot has closed a $50 million Series A funding round (€45 million) from Partech. The company has built a translation solution for websites. It helps you add more languages to your site without a lot of tweaking and without having to switch to a different CMS or e-commerce platform.
And this is key to understanding Weglot’s positioning. Translation plugins for WordPress of Shopify have been around for a while. But Weglot wants to build a universal product that works for all sorts of web experiences.
There are two ways to take advantage of Weglot. You can either add it to your existing website with a plugin — this is how Weglot works with WordPress, Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce. If you run a small company and don’t have a dedicated web developer, you could install Weglot without writing any line of code.
The other way is that you can add a few lines of Javascript to the <head> tag of your website. Weglot uses this approach for Webflow, Squarespace and BigCommerce. You also need to tweak your DNS records to create subdomains or subdirectories for new languages.
On Weglot’s servers, the company automatically detects and pulls content from the site. Weglot customers can use automatic translation to get started with new languages.
The company also offers a dashboard so that you can dive in your content and create better translations. You can grant access to professional translators and manage translations from that interface.
After that, you have a multilingual site. Whenever a visitor loads your site, the website will load in their favorite language by default. You can also add a language switcher in the corner of your website if you want to offer multiple options.
Even though translations are stored on Weglot’s servers, Weglot creates dedicated subdirectories or subdomains for each language. This way, Google and other search engines can index each language variant of your website. Metadata and keywords can also be translated with Weglot.
The startup charges a monthly subscription depending on the number of languages and words that you need. Last year, Weglot has reached $11 million (€10 million) in annual recurring revenue. Not bad for a startup that hasn’t raised any outside capital since its seed round in 2017.
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