Olivier Debeugny, Founder and CEO of Lingua Custodia;

Lingua Custodia, the Fintech Company specialised in AI applied to Financial Translation, has announced a +€1M fundraising operation to fuel its business development strategy in Europe; this brings the total amount of funds raised since its inception in 2011 to €2.4m.

While significant support was provided by Investessor, the French Business Angels’ network from which the company raised almost €300k, Lingua Custodia succeeded in this new round of funding thanks to continued confidence from existing shareholders and its ability to convince new French and European individual investors.

Lingua Custodia was founded by former asset management professionals to solve the translation issues they experienced. They observed that finance professionals can spend up to 15% of their time translating texts themselves that are too technical or too urgent to be outsourced.

From this initial observation came the idea of building machine translation engines specifically designed for the financial industry and specialised by type of document/linguistic sub-domain. The aim was twofold: cater to the full spectrum of industry needs and achieve a superior translation quality thanks to highly domain-focused deep learning algorithms. The result: tapping into an estimated market potential of €1 billion in Europe alone.

After an initial three years of Research and Development, the company brought its first engine to market at the end of 2014. It now offers a full range of services, with around 100 specialised engines available in 9 languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and more recently Chinese and Japanese.

The company presides over accounts with more than fifty clients, including heavyweights from the French and European banking industries.

Lingua Custodia offers three levels of services, all accessible via a secure web platform:
• A range of machine translation engines specialised by document type (fund prospectuses, annual reports, equity research, etc.)
• Customised machine translation engines which learn from the specific vocabulary used by a financial institution and personalise its translations
• An innovative approach combining both artificial and human intelligence to deliver finalised, ready to use translations.

Lingua Custodia has consolidated the quality of its engines and successfully tested its business model in France, now intending to strongly accelerate its growth in the European market.

The funds raised are therefore earmarked primarily to support the recruitment of a Luxembourg-based sales team, Lingua Custodia’s chosen market for the opening of the first overseas subsidiary, which is scheduled for September 2019. The funds will also be used to invest in Marketing and Customer Servicing tools to support the overall business growth plan.

Olivier Debeugny, Founder and CEO of Lingua Custodia, said “This fundraising is a milestone in Lingua Custodia’s development. It is a testament to the quality of our research and technology and the strengths of our foundations. The combination of these elements constitutes the basis on which we will be able to grow our position in Europe, before turning to the Asian market over the next 2 years.”

About Lingua Custodia

Composed of a team of 15 people, Lingua Custodia - the language custodian in Latin - has been recognised as a Young Innovative Company by the Ministry of Research, certified by Finance Innovation since 2014 and is one of the founding members of the France Fintech association created in 2015. The company is also a member of the LHoFT (Luxembourg House of Financial Technology) since 2018.