Translation AI Agency Lengoo Files for Bankruptcy

Lengoo, a Berlin-based language service provider (LSP) which by February 2021 had raised USD 34m from a number of different investors, has filed for bankruptcy, according to regulatory filings with a Berlin court (in German).

Lengoo was founded in 2014 by Philipp Koch-Büttner, Christopher Kränzler, and Alexander Gigga, and began raising external capital around 2018. At the time of bankruptcy filing, Christopher Kränzler was still CEO.

Lengoo initially offered an online platform for automating project management and other administrative tasks. After the first 2018-2021 funding rounds, the company turned its focus to integrating AI technology into its translation offering.

During that main funding period, investors were increasingly confident in machine translation and early AI-enabled technologies, seemingly following each other’s moves in the market. Among them were Lengoo’s investors Redalpine, Creathor Ventures, Piton Capital, Inkef Capital, Techstars, Polipo Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

In 2021, Lengoo said in a press statement that it would use the funds to “build a global presence for […] globally active clients.” They indeed expanded operations to the US, the UK, Scandinavia, and Poland, and continued developing their proprietary translation system. 

Joachim Voigt-Salus has now been appointed as provisional insolvency administrator. Different German news sites put Lengoo’s accumulated losses somewhere between USD 8 and 16m. Slator contacted the company for a comment but has not heard back at time of publication.