Press releases

Paris, August 10th, 2020

SYSTRAN, the leader in AI-based translation technology announces that the majority of its shares has been purchased by a consortium of Korean institutional investors: STIC Investments, SoftBank Korea, Korea Investment Partners and Korea Investment Securities.

STIC Investments Inc., now the majority shareholder with 51% of SYSTRAN shares, is one of the largest and most experienced private equity firms in Korea. STIC seeks to create growth and prosperity in economies across Asia through investing in companies that engage in promising businesses, with an investment portfolio over 70 companies and 4.5B$ assets under management.

ACCELERATING SYSTRAN’S GROWTH

SYSTRAN is the largest pure player in the artificial intelligence-based translation software industry.   SYSTRAN customers range from government agencies to public organizations and corporates, and the company operates worldwide with offices in Europe, Americas and Asia. SYSTRAN has also been involved in open source development since 2016 with OpenNMT, a framework used by thousands or researchers and industrial users.

According to Jean Senellart, SYSTRAN group CEO: “This acquisition is exciting and will give us more resources to increase our innovation and delivery speed and geographical footprint, enabling us to further expand through our new Cloud Marketplace offering as well as provide secure, on premises or cloud-based customized translation products for all industries and organizations of all sizes”.

Jean Senellart has a track record of innovation over the past 20 years at SYSTRAN. Under his stewardship R&D teams have launched four generations of Machine Translation products allowing SYSTRAN to remain at the forefront of innovation in an increasingly competitive sector.

A GOOD FIT FOR STIC PORTFOLIO

Throughout its 20 years of operations, STIC has been investing in various sectors including Information and Communication Technologies.

Regarding the acquisition, Daniel Kyung Hyung Lee, Head of Investment division I at STIC commented: “SYSTRAN is a leading AI company that we have been following for many years. Together with other investors, we believe that SYSTRAN can continue leading the language industry, and we are excited to support this new stage of SYSTRAN long history. The ability to communicate with others in their own language is a key milestone for any international business and we see SYSTRAN at the forefront of this capability.”

About SYSTRAN

With more than 50 years of experience in translation technologies, SYSTRAN has pioneered the greatest innovations in the field, including the first web-based translation portals and the first neural translation engines combining artificial intelligence and neural networks for businesses and public organizations.

SYSTRAN provides business users with advanced and secure translation solutions in various areas such as: global collaboration, multilingual content production, customer support, electronic investigation, Big Data analysis, e-commerce, etc.

In 2019, SYSTRAN launches a unique cloud-based platform bringing together the best of neural translation technology and a global network of experts to train domain-specific translation models. With this Marketplace, SYSTRAN has the ambition to offer the best translation quality through thousands of translation models tailored to domains such as legal, medical, IT, retail and much more.