Success case on Horizon 2020 – Unbabel in “EU innovation Champions league”

It was with great enthusiasm that we received the news of the approval by European Commission of the Unbabel submission to support program dedicated to Innovative SME (SME Instrument) of Horizon 2020 Program.

Unabel is a Portuguese startup that combines automatic translation with a people community – translators and publishers. It was the first Portuguese company to enter YCombinator accelerator and developed an innovating business model that ensures high quality translation, at a very fast and accessible price.

The actual working translators team covers: Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Arab, Japanese, Turkish, Italian, Mandarin, Greek, polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and Malayan. The translators demand and the dominant language variety is constantly rising, to ensure a global service.

Unbabel clients can request a translation service via email, or access the service through an API, that involves the possibility to integrate directly on MailChimp or Zendesk.

Unbabel applied for the SME Instrument cut-off on September 2014 with AAVANZ
support – there was 1944 submissions, where 608 were in the same category (Information and Communication Technologies), with an approval rate of 9% – these competitions have a high rate demand, being highly competitive that are called “European innovation champions league”, by what we were significantly satisfied with Unbabel success.

For visibility studies – first phase of this contest – 199 companies were selected from 25 countries, involved in 178 projects, which will receive, on total, around 9 million euros.

Between the beneficiaries, there are 6 Portuguese companies, being Unbabel one of them. Each project will receive 50 thousand euros to carry through viability tests.

There is a still a long way ahead, but this victory came to improve this team motivation and of this excellent project, that we will keep watching.