TextMaster Raises €1.64M To Bring The Crowd To Translation, Copywriting & Proofreading

Steve O'Hear

Steve O’Hear is probably best known as a technology journalist, currently at TechCrunch where he focuses mainly on European startups, companies and products. He was previously co-founder and CEO of expertise platform Beepl where he helped the company navigate its first VC round, along with seeing the product through development, private alpha and a high profile public launch. In November... → Learn More

Monday, November 19th, 2012
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A year on from launch, TextMaster, the crowdsourced platform for content translation, copywriting, and proofreading, has raised its first funding round: €1.64 million from the French VC fund, Alven Capital, and business angels, including Fabrice Grinda (Founder of Aucland.fr and co-founder of OLX Inc.) and Geoffroy Bragadir (Founder of Empruntis). The Brussels-headquartered company says it will use the new capital to “accelerate” growth as it expands internationally, including opening an office in New York.

TextMaster offers a platform for content creators to crowdsource their copywriting, translation and proofreading needs via its community of ‘professionals’ who have each gone through a quality vetting process and are paid per word. We’ve previously described the service as a bit like Mechanical Turk but for a very specific niche.

TextMaster claims that 4,000 clients have used the service in its 12 months of operation, including AlloCiné, Cityrama, and Zagat, while its ‘crowd’ has grown to 35,000 copy editors, writers and translators who have processed “more than 12.5 million words.” Refreshingly, the startup has been international more or less from the get go. TextMaster is available in eight languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Chinese.

It’s also gunning to be a platform in the true sense of the word. Back in July, TextMaster rolled out a public API so that app developers could build copywriting, translation and proofreading functionality into their wares.

Some of TextMaster’s competitors include Scripted, Greatcontent, and Textbroker (copywriting), Wordy (proofreading), and Gengo (translation).


Company: TextMaster
Website: textmaster.com
Launch Date: January 1, 2011
Funding: $2M

Textmaster is a professional translation, copywriting and proofreading content service. Textmaster offers a high-quality service to its clients, agencies, SMEs or large corporations, at a very affordable price. The service is suitable for any specific need (articles, leaflets, contracts) or large projects (databases, listings). Are you an author? Join our community with over 35,000 registered authors, translators and editors, and earn some money with your skills whenever and wherever you want.

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Financial-organization: Alven Capital
Website: alvencapital.com
Launch Date: 2000

ALVEN CAPITAL PARTNERS is a management company that manages about €150M in four investment funds: * SCR Alven Capital * FCPR Alven Capital II * FCPI CAAM Innovation 5 * FCPR Alven Capital III Funds managed by ALVEN CAPITAL PARTNERS take minority stakes in companies with strong growth in the media, services and information technology fields. Initial investment from € 200K to € 5 million. Investment team: * Guillaume Aubin, Managing Partner * Charles Letourneur, Managing Partner * Nicolas Celier, Partner *...

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