This DeepL company profile covers the company's valuation, revenue, funding rounds, investors and history. DeepL works in artificial intelligence, with a focus on language AI and translation. It was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Cologne, Germany. Its latest valuation on record is US$2 billion (May 2024). Every figure links to a public source, and anything the company hasn't disclosed is marked as such.
Revenue
Funding history
| Date | Round | Amount | Valuation | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2024 | Equity round | US$300M | US$2B | Index Ventures (lead); ICONIQ Growth, Teachers' Venture Growth, IVP, Atomico, WiL | Vestbee |
| Jan 2023 | Equity round | See source | About US$1B | See source | NBC New York (CNBC) |
DeepL timeline
Key dates from the sources on this page, oldest first. Metric snapshots are listed after the funding events.
- 2017 — DeepL is founded in Cologne by Jarek Kutylowski (CEO).
- Jan 2023 — Equity round: See source, valuing the company at About US$1B.
- May 2024 — Equity round: US$300M, valuing the company at US$2B. Investors: Index Ventures (lead); ICONIQ Growth, Teachers' Venture Growth, IVP, Atomico, WiL.
Investors
Overview
DeepL is a German AI company best known for its translation service, which many users consider more natural and accurate than older machine translation tools. People can translate text and whole documents on its website and apps for free, and businesses pay for subscriptions and an API that let them translate at scale with stronger security. DeepL has expanded into AI writing assistance with DeepL Write, real-time voice translation for meetings and conversations, and AI agents for business tasks.
DeepL grew out of Linguee, an online dictionary that showed translated sentences from millions of documents. Jarek Kutylowski, a computer scientist who had worked at Linguee, led the development of DeepL's neural translation system, which launched in 2017, and he is the company's CEO. It is based in Cologne, with offices in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, New York and Tokyo.
How DeepL makes money
- DeepL Pro subscriptions: individuals and teams pay for unlimited text translation, larger document translations, glossaries and data security, including a promise not to store or train on customers' texts.
- Enterprise contracts: companies buy licences for many employees with administration, single sign-on and integrations.
- API: developers and companies pay by volume to build DeepL translation into websites, apps and workflows.
- Voice and Write: newer products sold alongside translation.
DeepL says it serves hundreds of thousands of business customers. Data security has been central to its pitch to companies in regulated industries such as law, finance and healthcare, especially in Europe.
Funding history
DeepL was self-sustaining for years and raised relatively little external capital at first. Its funding grew as the AI market heated up:
- January 2023: a round that valued DeepL at about US$1 billion.
- May 2024: US$300 million led by Index Ventures at a US$2 billion valuation, doubling its value. New investors ICONIQ Growth and Teachers' Venture Growth joined existing backers IVP, Atomico and WiL. DeepL said the money would fund growth in key markets including the US.
We haven't found a newer priced round in reliable sources. Press reports in 2025 said DeepL was considering an IPO; nothing had been announced when we last checked.
Revenue
DeepL doesn't publish financial results, and the estimates in third-party databases vary widely, so we show revenue as not disclosed. Our guide to finding private company revenue explains why modelled estimates for private companies should be treated with care.
Competition from general AI models
DeepL's biggest challenge is the rise of large language models. Tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude can translate well and are often already available to employees. Google Translate and Microsoft Translator are free and integrated into widely used products. DeepL's response has been to emphasise translation quality in professional contexts, data security, glossaries and consistent terminology, and integrations with business tools, while building its own language models. In 2026 reports said DeepL planned to cut a significant share of its workforce as it reorganised around AI, a sign of the pressure in the market.
Competitive landscape
Besides general AI assistants and big-tech translation services, DeepL competes with translation management platforms, localisation companies and specialist providers of machine translation for enterprises. Its advantages are a strong brand among professional users, European data handling, and a decade of focused work on translation quality.
What to watch next
Watch for a new funding round or IPO filing, growth of enterprise and voice products, how it competes as general AI models improve, and any disclosure of revenue.
Key facts at a glance
DeepL is a Cologne language AI company led by CEO Jarek Kutylowski, which launched its translation service in 2017. It raised US$300 million led by Index Ventures at a US$2 billion valuation in May 2024, doubling its value from early 2023. Its products include DeepL Translator, DeepL Write, voice translation and an API for businesses.
Why translation quality matters to businesses
For casual use, a rough translation is often fine. For businesses, mistakes can be costly: a mistranslated contract clause, safety instruction or product description can create legal risk or lose customers. Companies also need consistent terminology across thousands of documents. That is why many businesses pay for professional machine translation with glossaries and quality controls, often followed by human review for important content. DeepL's success came from serving these professional needs better than free tools.
Europe's AI champions
DeepL is one of a small group of European AI companies with global reach, alongside Mistral AI in France and others. European policymakers have promoted homegrown AI as a matter of economic and digital sovereignty, and European customers often prefer providers that store and process data in the EU. That gives companies like DeepL an advantage at home, though they still have to compete with much larger US firms on technology and price.
Questions to ask before choosing a translation provider
- Where is your data processed, and is it stored or used for training?
- How does quality compare on your own documents and language pairs?
- Can you enforce glossaries and a consistent tone?
- How does pricing scale with volume and users?
How neural machine translation works
Older machine translation systems translated phrase by phrase using statistics from large collections of translated text, which often produced stiff or ungrammatical sentences. Neural machine translation, which DeepL adopted from the start, uses deep learning models that read a whole sentence or passage and generate a translation that fits the context. That's why it handles idioms, word order and tone much better. The quality depends heavily on training data, and DeepL benefited from Linguee's years of experience collecting high-quality bilingual text. Newer large language models use similar underlying techniques at much larger scale, which is why the gap between specialist and general tools has narrowed.
For businesses, the practical question is no longer whether machine translation is usable, but which provider gives the best results for their languages, subject matter and security requirements, at an acceptable cost.
What this means if you're…
A business translating content: test providers on your real documents and check data handling terms carefully.
A founder in AI: DeepL shows how focus and quality can build a strong business, and how quickly general models can change the competitive picture.
An investor: watch whether DeepL can grow enterprise revenue fast enough to stay ahead of general AI tools.
Latest developments (October 2026)
DeepL has not announced a new priced round since its May 2024 raise of US$300 million at US$2 billion. Bloomberg reported in 2025 that it had held preliminary talks with advisers about a possible US listing that could value it at up to US$5 billion, according to Reuters. We found no filing by October 2026. DeepL continues to expand its AI translation and writing tools for businesses.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from the public sources below. Where sources disagreed, we used the company's own announcement or a primary news report. Private-company data changes; check the date beside each figure.
Frequently asked questions
What does DeepL do?
DeepL is a artificial intelligence / language ai and translation company headquartered in Cologne, Germany. It was founded in 2017.
What is DeepL's valuation?
DeepL was valued at US$2 billion as of May 2024, according to NBC New York (CNBC). Private company valuations are set at funding rounds or share sales and can change significantly between them.
How much revenue does DeepL make?
DeepL is a private company and has not publicly disclosed its revenue. Figures on third-party sites are usually modelled estimates rather than numbers reported by the company.
What was DeepL's latest funding round?
The most recent financing we have verified is a equity round in May 2024: US$300M, at a valuation of US$2B. Source: Vestbee.
Who are DeepL's investors?
Investors named in public announcements include Index Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Teachers' Venture Growth, IVP, Atomico and WiL.
Who founded DeepL?
DeepL was founded in 2017 by Jarek Kutylowski (CEO).
Is DeepL a public company?
No. DeepL is a private company (private, venture backed), so its shares are not traded on a stock exchange and it isn't required to publish its financial results.
Where is DeepL headquartered?
DeepL is headquartered in Cologne, Germany.