Dimitris Glezos, CEO of Transifex, which a few days ago announced a $2.5 million funding deal from leading international investors, was a young convert to the digital revolution.
As a student in the Department of Computer Engineering of the Polytechnic School of the University of Patras, he created the department's website, while also working in the private sector as a programmer. Subsequently, he started a PhD at the University of Manchester focusing on the application of fuzzy logic in artificial intelligence systems.
Simultaneously, he was active in the free software community and especially in the Fedora operating system. «At that time it had about 10 million users, 1,000 translators and about 300 developers – almost all volunteers», says Mr. Glezos in «K». «Collaboration between translators and developers was particularly problematic. The former did not want to get involved with technical issues, the latter were unable to manage anything concerning the language».
That's how Transifex was born, an innovative software that dramatically simplifies this tedious process and was enthusiastically embraced by the free software community. In 2009, Mr. Glezos participated in Google's Summer of Code program, where he further developed the idea, abandoned his PhD, and founded his company (originally named Indifex) in Patras.
«From our first clients were Intel and Nokia», says the young –just 32 years old today– entrepreneur. «There was a great demand for what we offered». Today, five years later, the company has moved from Patras to Athens and has opened an office in Silicon Valley – from where Mr. Glezos spoke to us. It has clients from 30 and more countries, its services are used in 17,000 projects with 170,000 users. But what exactly do these services consist of?
To learn, «K» went to Transifex's headquarters in Neo Heraklion, the company's research and development headquarters. Her office, with a Breaking Bad poster and books such as Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point on the shelves, is located in a shared space with the offices of Persado, another very promising Greek start-up. «They gave us the space preferentially because they weren’t using it and they liked the idea of the climate that would be created. It has worked wonderfully», says Mr. Glezos. It is another example of the collaboration that exists among the emerging online businesses in Greece – in direct contrast to the mutual suspicion and unfair competition that characterize most other sectors.
Antonis Garnelis, head of product development, explains to us its miraculous properties. According to the company's website, Transifex has evolved from a translation tool for the open‑source world into a global platform for «localization» (localization) of software products. What does this mean? «That it makes the translation process much more efficient and significantly reduces the cost for the client», explains Mr. Garnelis. «For example, we have introduced an algorithm called translation memory, which stores all translations that have been made. Thus, when a new translation is needed, which is largely similar to an older one, the algorithm detects the similarity and suggests to the translator to use it, instead of doing the work from scratch».
Word of mouth
The seed capital of $2.5 million that Transifex secured was the first in its short history. Until now, it had grown exclusively word‑of‑mouth, among developers and the free‑software community. The main investor is New Enterprise Associates, an American venture capital fund with $13 billion invested worldwide. The financing also included angel investors, among them Silicon Valley veteran Thanos Triant and George Papadopoulos, founder of the company Atypon. The money will be used to develop Transifex Live, the company's new service that automatically translates content by adding a single line of code to a website.
Source: kathimerini.gr
