TransPerfect Acquires Unbabel, Reveals Integration Plans

New York-based Language Solutions Integrator (LSI) TransPerfect has announced that it has completed the acquisition of rival LSI Unbabel. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

As recently as June 2025, Unbabel released TOWER+, a suite of open-weight multilingual LLMs, and EuroVLM, a suite of multilingual vision-language models, which complement its legacy flagship model, TowerLLM. The company’s research team has also contributed to developing numerous machine translation evaluation metrics, such as COMET, AutoMQM, and CONTEXT-MQM.

Commenting on the acquisition, TransPerfect President and Co-CEO Phil Shawe told Slator that “the combined R&D resources of TransPerfect and Unbabel will further develop the TowerLLM tool set. These investments will likely include additional language pairs and fine-tuning industry-specific models — all of which will benefit clients.”

Unbabel’s large language models will be integrated into TransPerfect’s GlobalLink tech stack, enabling the Super Agency to “significantly expand the range and sophistication of AI solutions available to customers.”

Shawe confirmed to Slator that the company has “no plans at present to change how Unbabel operates with respect to existing open-source versions of either TowerLLM or COMET,” and confirmed that Unbabel will become a division of TransPerfect.

“For the most part it will be business as usual. As we integrate Unbabel products into our GlobalLink ecosystem, we expect that there will be many shared projects among the Unbabel and GlobalLink tech teams,” he stated.

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Vasco Pedro, Co-Founder and CEO at Unbabel, will remain with the company “for several months” to oversee the integration, before Unbabel’s technical team transitions to reporting directly to TransPerfect’s Chief Technology Officer. Pedro commented: “Now, within TransPerfect, [Unbabel’s] technologies and the people behind them will have an unparalleled platform to scale and deliver even greater impact.”

Commenting on how TransPerfect will leverage Unbabel’s research team to build out other technology solutions or language capabilities, Shawe told Slator: “We are excited to welcome Unbabel’s R&D team and will continue investing in AI-focused development to benefit our clients.” 

“We already have many AI-enhanced capabilities related to dubbing, subtitling, over-the-phone interpretation, and live conference interpreting — and it will be exciting to see how Unbabel technology advances these tool sets,” he concluded.