At a Glance
- Legal name
- Unbabel, Inc. (Delaware) / Unbabel Lda. (Portugal)
- Registry number
- N/A · verify
- Jurisdiction
- Delaware, USA (parent) / Portugal (ops HQ)
- Ownership
- private
- Employees
- 201-500
- Revenue (est.)
- $10-100M
- Headquarters
- Rua da Prata 80, 1100-420 Lisbon
Unbabel is an AI-powered translation platform founded in Lisbon in 2013 by Vasco Pedro, Joao Graca, Bruno Silva, Hugo Silva and Sofia Pessanha.
Unbabel is an AI-powered translation platform founded in Lisbon in 2013 by Vasco Pedro, Joao Graca, Bruno Silva, Hugo Silva and Sofia Pessanha. The company sits at the intersection of machine translation and human-in-the-loop quality, originally pairing neural MT output with a global crowd of bilingual editors to produce enterprise-quality translations for customer support tickets, chat and knowledge bases. More recently it has leaned heavily into LLM-native workflows through its LangOps platform.\n\nUnbabel graduated from Y Combinator in 2014 and has raised more than $100M across seed, Series A, B, C and D rounds from Point72 Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Greycroft, Notion Capital, Microsoft M12 and Salesforce Ventures. Its customers include large B2C brands with global support operations - Microsoft, Booking, Logitech, Panasonic, Uber and others - that route multilingual tickets through Unbabel's Zendesk, Salesforce and Freshdesk integrations. Legally, the parent is Unbabel, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp; engineering and research sit in Lisbon under Unbabel Lda.
- 1
Estonia e-Residency play
Unbabel is one of the research-heaviest companies in the Lisbon unicorn set - the engineering team has historically co-published papers with INESC-ID and collaborated closely with the University of Lisbon's NLP group. That academic lineage matters because it explains the company's shape: the hard IP was built in Portugal, but the commercial parent is a Delaware C-Corp (Unbabel, Inc.) because that is what Y Combinator alumni and US growth investors almost always require for meaningful preferred-share structures.\n\nThe pattern is identical to OutSystems, Talkdesk and Remote: Portuguese operating entity (Unbabel Lda.) employs the engineering and research staff, a Delaware parent holds the IP and raises capital, an intercompany services agreement moves cost plus a margin from one to the other.
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Tax strategy
Unbabel's presence in Lisbon has strengthened the city's reputation as a serious AI/NLP hub - it predates the current LLM wave by almost a decade and survived it by pivoting fast into LangOps and agentic translation workflows.\n\nThe broader Portuguese unicorn ecosystem accelerated around Unbabel after Web Summit moved to Lisbon in 2016. Suddenly Sequoia and a16z were regular visitors, and the NHR tax regime made it trivial to bring senior US product leaders to Portugal for multi-year stints.
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Estonia e-Residency play
Remote, also Lisbon-based, is essentially productising the legal/payroll plumbing that Unbabel originally had to build in-house to hire globally while its topco sat in Delaware. Feedzai in fraud, Sword Health in digital MSK and Talkdesk in CCaaS complete the cluster. Unbabel's 2024 LLM pivot is a test of whether specialist translation companies can defend margin against frontier models - the company's answer is to sell governance, compliance and quality tooling on top of any model, betting that enterprise buyers want an accountable layer.
Corporate Timeline
- Aug 2013Incorporation
Unbabel founded
Founded in 2013.
Replicate Unbabel's structure in 4 steps
The formation playbook, distilled from how this company was actually set up.
Portuguese Lda
Replicating Unbabel's structure: form a Delaware C-Corp as the fundraising parent, then set up a Portuguese Lda.
Parent-subsidiary layout
(Sociedade por Quotas) as a wholly owned subsidiary for engineering and research.
Portuguese Lda
The Lda.
Tax strategy
bills the Delaware parent under a cost-plus 7-10 percent intercompany services agreement and hires under Portuguese labour law (12-month contracts, Codigo do Trabalho rules). Register with IRN, file RCBE for beneficial ownership, claim SIFIDE II R&D tax credits against Portuguese corporate tax on research activity, and maintain clean transfer pricing documentation to survive an Autoridade Tributaria audit.
Recent News & Filings
- Unbabel - 2026 Funding Rounds & List of Investors - TracxnTracxn · 7 Apr 2026
- Unbabel Releases TowerLLM, Offering Precision in Multilingual Translation - HPCwireHPCwire · 12 Mar 2026
- Ex-Unbabel founder Vasco Pedro launches AI agents startup Spinnable - - Essential Business- Essential Business · 12 Nov 2025
- SlatorCon Recap, Cohere’s Big AI Translation Launch, TransPerfect Buys Unbabel - SlatorSlator · 12 Sep 2025
- TransPerfect Solidifies Leadership Position in Language AI by Acquiring Unbabel - PR NewswirePR Newswire · 22 Aug 2025
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Unbabel do?
It provides an AI translation platform for enterprise customer service - multilingual support tickets, chat, knowledge base and now agentic workflows via its LangOps product.
Is Unbabel profitable?
Unbabel has not publicly disclosed profitability. It raised a Series D in 2020 and continues to raise and invest in LLM-era product.
Where does Unbabel do research?
Primarily in Lisbon, with longstanding collaborations with INESC-ID and the University of Lisbon NLP group.
Is Unbabel a Portuguese company?
Its research and engineering centre is Lisbon under Unbabel Lda., but the legal parent is Unbabel, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp, as is standard for US-VC-backed Portuguese unicorns.
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