Vitruvian Partners makes majority growth investment in Smartling to accelerate growth of AI translation platform

Investment positions Smartling to scale its agentic localization capabilities, extend global reach, and accelerate its lead in the AI translation category

NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Smartling, the leading AI translation platform, announced that it has been acquired by Vitruvian Partners, a leading international growth-focused investment firm, from tech-focused investment firm Battery Ventures.

The investment from Vitruvian will accelerate Smartling's product roadmap, expand the company's agentic localization capabilities, and expand its global go-to-market footprint. Smartling will continue to operate under its existing leadership, with Bryan Murphy continuing as Chief Executive Officer.

Over the past several years, Smartling pioneered the shift from traditional localization to an AI translation platform that delivers quality and trust together with enterprise-grade workflow automation in an open, API and agent first platform. More than 1000 global brands including some of the world's leading frontier labs rely on Smartling to translate billions of words annually across websites, applications, support content, and marketing experiences.  The company has been named to Fast Company's annual list of the World's Most Innovative Companies for the past two years in a row,  ranking third in the business-services category.

Executive commentary

"The Smartling Team is the best in the business — a team who has spent years obsessing over how to help our customers reach more of the world with experiences that truly drive growth. Partnering with Vitruvian helps us deliver more of what our customers need: AI Translation that enables them to translate more experiences faster, with quality they can trust. We have never been more excited about what this team is building, or more confident in the impact it will have for the brands that trust us every day." — Bryan Murphy, Chief Executive Officer, Smartling

"Translation is one of the largest industries being reshaped by AI, and Smartling has built a leading position at the centre of this transformation, powering how global enterprises communicate. With its differentiated LanguageAI capabilities and a resilient business model, the company is driving the next phase of innovation in localization. We are excited to back the Smartling team as they scale their category-defining platform." — Tomer Yosef-Or, Partner, Vitruvian Partners

Accelerating the AI translation platform

The investment will provide Smartling with additional resources to:

• Extend leadership in AI-powered translation and agentic localization, including new LLM-based quality, evaluation, and self-service capabilities.
• Invest further in the Smartling platform — spanning translation management, Language AI agents, and API-first integrations across the modern content stack.
• Expand into new industries and international markets, with a deeper presence in EMEA and APAC.
• Pursue strategic M&A that complements the platform's language AI roadmap.

About Smartling

Smartling is transforming how global enterprises create, manage, and scale multilingual content in the AI era. Its LanguageAI™ platform combines AI translation, workflow automation, and quality assurance infrastructure to help organizations automate multilingual content operations at enterprise scale. Trusted by leading global brands, Smartling enables companies to move faster globally while maintaining the quality, trust, and oversight required for enterprise AI translation.

About Vitruvian Partners

Vitruvian Partners is a global growth-focused investor with offices across London, Miami, San Francisco, Stockholm, Munich, Madrid, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Singapore, and Shanghai. Vitruvian focuses on dynamic situations characterized by rapid growth and change across asset-light industries. Vitruvian has over $20 billion of active funds which have backed many global winners and leaders in their sectors, including Darktrace, Cognition, Hinge Health, Alphasense, Options IT, Just Eat, EasyPark, Skyscanner, Wise, Global-e and CFC. Further information can be found at www.vitruvianpartners.com.