KUDO Series A funding announcement: A note from CEO Fardad Zabetian

I co-founded KUDO in 2017 with one mission: to eliminate language barriers worldwide. It’s a big, ambitious goal, and I’m proud that every day we get closer to achieving it. We’ve made multilingual meetings more accessible and created the largest community of professional conference interpreters. Since launching, we’ve provided real-time multilingual interpretation to some of the world’s largest international organizations and companies. And with KUDO Marketplace, we’re bringing interpretation to businesses and people who had never before considered it.

Today, I am extremely excited to announce that KUDO has raised $21 million in Series A Funding! To our customers, partners, and early investors ID8 Investments, Advancit Capital and AirAngels, thank you for sharing our vision of a language-barrier-free future and trusting us with your most delicate meetings and events. To our Series A investors, including Felicis Ventures, Maverick Ventures, Elephant VC, FJ Labs, Global Founders Capital and billionaire activist investor Bill Ackman, thank you for believing in our vision and helping to accelerate our ability to realize it.

Interpreters, thank you for working tirelessly and supporting hundreds of thousands of meetings on KUDO to date! KUDO would not be where it is without each and every one of you supporting our mission for the last 4 years. We know how important it is to educate the market on the value of language inclusivity and the benefits of multilingualism, and we now have the bandwidth and resources to do so. We can’t wait to see a greater demand for your expertise, as new markets and use cases who hadn’t previously considered interpretation begin to do so.

And to the KUDO team, this accomplishment is the direct result of your teamwork, dedication, ingenuity, and passion. To say that I am both grateful and proud of the entire KUDO team would be an understatement. KUDO will be investing a large portion of this funding in you, because we know that when you are supported, empowered and motivated, your accomplishments are limitless. Let’s build this dream together!

This investment comes at a crucial time for both KUDO and the global business landscape as we all continue to feel the harrowing effects of COVID-19. The pandemic-fueled shift to remote work has triggered lasting changes in the global economy. As some companies begin (or continue) to globalize, others are in the process of recovering from the pandemic. Whether globalizing or recovering KUDO will be there, offering a platform that allows businesses within public and private sectors to collaborate and engage on a global scale by expanding language capabilities.

In addition to the already growing demand for multilingual meeting platforms, more and more companies are offering full remote work to employees and other companies are beginning to welcome employees back to the office. KUDO offers a service that compliments this new normal with our hybrid meeting capabilities. Furthermore, with KUDO Marketplace, clients will be able to book interpreters and schedule their own meetings, once again making multilingual communication more accessible.

To continue making progress on our goal of breaking language barriers, we’ll be investing in the trifecta of people, process and technology:

We’ll hire key team members in engineering and product management, and further invest in our technology infrastructure

• We’ll empower the interpreter community and the KUDO team with well defined processes so that we can continue to offer a flawless customer experience.
• We’ll build and refine the technology to fit the changing needs of our customers as the world adapts to the new future of work.
• And, as inclusivity is at our core, I believe wholeheartedly that a strong, talented, and diversified team is paramount when it comes to realizing a vision as big as ours.

Our vision is a future in which companies are able to train and develop their global teams, sales executives can rapidly scale to new global markets, marketers are able to connect with audiences that were once out of reach, and thought leaders, educators, and executives in any field are able to broaden their scopes using KUDO. By investing in product, engineering and our growing team, we’ll continue enabling learning and sharing with peers on a global scale, increasing collaboration and ingenuity. We will continue to fuel the fire of innovation within online multilingual meetings and events; it is in our DNA.

Better grab your sunglasses because the future is bright.