In the summer of 1999 in a small apartment in Torvaianica, a seaside town in southern Rome, two boys, in love, were looking for the future. Marco Trombetti had studied physics, had a passion for the stars, but in the fourth year of university he had made a startup that he had sold on the fly and with that money he ended up in France; there he had found his wife, Isabelle Andrieu, who was fond of languages. The two fall in love and try to do something together: they call it Translated, the idea is that algorithms can make the job of translators easier, never replace them. There is no greater problem in the world of misunderstanding, they say, the tower of Babel: if you solve that you solve the rest.
The first employee is a Lithuanian girl they meet in Torvaianica. Twenty-two years have passed, the Lithuanian girl is still in her place but she is no longer alone, 105 employees have become, and Translated has just closed an investment round with the most important European fund (Ardian): thirty million dollars for the 12 percent, the rest is still in the hands of Marco and Isabella who in the meantime have transformed Translated into an international case: in a sector where giants dominate, starting with Google, the Roman company is projected to become the first unicorn made in Rome, the first startup valued at over a billion dollars: today it is worth about 200 million, it makes 42 a year, with a margin of 10, it grows year on year by 30 percent and if it continues like this in 2024 it reaches that symbolic goal. Translated’s technology and community of over 200,000 translators are the authors of all Airbnb content in 62 languages except English and, since 2006, also of all translated ads on Google.
To give two examples, but there is also Uber to say. It took a long time to get here: more than twenty years. Would they have done this before? Maybe. But it went like this: the first customer was Enel, at the beginning of the 2000s, since then the growth has been constant, without having to ask anyone for money. Now is the time for the big leap. In the meantime, Marco and Isabella have given birth to three children, bought half a dozen villas in Eur where they have created an accelerator to help other startups and an artificial intelligence school. Impossible not to notice that in a villa there is a swimming pool with an inflatable unicorn.
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