CIBC Innovation Banking is a provider of growth capital to emerging B2B software companies that have previously received equity investment. Being a leading player in North America having provided almost $8 billion of capital commitment to the ‘innovation economy’ in the last 5 years, CIBC IB is making a big push in the UK and European market in the venture debt space. It is cashing in on this the venture debt sector, which is becoming an interesting space right now after the SVB collapse a few months ago, and SVB UK’s rebrand.

Now, CIBC IB has provided €12 million in debt financing to Phrase, a Prague-headquartered global cloud-based localisation software provider. Phrase will use the funds to further develop the next generation of AI-driven language technology.

Georg Ell, Phrase CEO, said: “CIBC Innovation Banking’s financing will help us take our localization technology to the next level as the latest innovations in AI and machine learning continue to take off. Our business has seen tremendous growth as we’ve delivered on supporting our global clients at scale via the ease of use and connectivity our platform provides, and this investment will allow us to capitalise on the high-growth AI market.”

Sean Duffy, Managing Director of CIBC Innovation Banking’s European office, said: “We are delighted to be supporting Phrase as their software platform continues to evolve. They saw a clear need from global businesses for localisation services and have capitalised by creating a platform that makes the entire process easier and more seamless. The CIBC Innovation Banking  team is looking forward to supporting Phrase on their next stage of growth.”

Translation made seamless with AI 

Founded in 2010, Phrase, a language tech business, provides translation and localisation technology to global businesses. It has developed a platform that enables companies to connect, manage and automate every task involved in translating and localising content or software across an organisation in a centralised hub. Its system provides workflows and automation to manage projects with language service vendors, and internal linguistic resources and harnesses the latest in machine translation.

The Phrase Localisation Suite is equipped with the leading translation management system, a specialised platform for software and digital products. It is built to automate, manage, and translate all the content into the languages that audiences speak, and the experiences they live. It supports over 500 languages, over 50 file types, over 30 machine translation engines, and over 50 integrations. The enterprise-grade suite enables users to drive growth with a connected ecosystem of tools.

Organisations like Uber, Shopify, Volkswagen, and thousands of others trust in Phrase and accelerate their global growth by giving people the content they need, in the language they speak

Currently, the company has over 300 employees and over 4,500 customers across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and North America, which is a major growth market for the company.

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