Weglot, a popular WordPress multilingual plugin, has raised €45M from Partech Partners. This is the first time the Paris-based company has taken outside capital since it closed €450K in seed funding from SIDE Capital in 2017. Since that initial round Weglot has expanded its offerings to include more translations and integrations for other platforms.
Weglot co-founder Augustin Prot confirmed that the company is profitable with 25k customers paying for its SaaS translation platform and 60k+ websites using the company’s products, including IBM, Microsoft, Spotify, Steve Madden, and Volcom.
In 2021, Weglot passed €10M ARR, primarily through the sale of its WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow products, but the company also has growing user bases on Squarespace, Wix, Magento, BigCommerce, Square Online, and Salesforce.
Weglot has a free version of its plugin on WordPress.org for small websites (under 2,000 words) with one translation language. It includes a Gutenberg block that makes it easy for users to position and customize their language switcher. The plugin has 40,000 active installs. Commercial plans range from €99/year for 10,000 words and one translated language to €4,990/year for 5 million words and 20 translated languages.
Weglot’s chief competitors are WPML (a commercial product with no free version) and Polylang (700K installs), a free plugin with a pro version that provides additional features and support. Despite having a much smaller WordPress user base and going up against more established competitors, Prot said the company is aiming to “become the category leader for web translation.” Weglot employs a team of 30 people and plans to use the new funding to hire more over the coming year.
“We found success by focusing on usability and simplicity,” Prot said. “The SaaS model allows us to develop very quickly on the product side and the plugin is based on users’ and customers’ feedback. If you don’t take that into account they would simply leave. That’s why the SaaS approach favors continuous and fast improvement to make sure we match users’ expectations.”