#21 Cash for Lilt and Plint, Presbyterian Loc, Game M&A, SlatorCon Goes Remote

Despite Esther’s laptop going into its own form of lockdown, Florian and Esther ploughed ahead to bring you this week’s language industry news. Florian highlights three finance-focused stories, as Plint, Lilt and Keywords Studios, three very different types of language service providers, all announced financing news. Firstly, Florian shares news from Sweden, where private equity firm Priveq took a majority stake in Plint, a subtitling-focused media localizer whose revenues have grown significantly from 2015 when they first signed Netflix as a customer. Florian also unpacks tech-enabled LSP Lilt’s fortunately-timed USD 25m funding raise involving big names such as Intel Capital and Sequoia. The round completed ahead of the pandemic. And, in Ireland, gaming services provider Keywords Studios announced a GBP 100m share placing to fuel future acquisitions of smaller rivals weakened by the coronavirus pandemic.Breaking from the world of M&A and funding, Esther discusses insights into localization at the Presbyterian Church in the US, courtesy of Jason Raff, Global Language Resources Manager. With 1.7m members and 10,000 congregations in the US, the Presbyterian Church established an Office of Language Resources in 2018 to improve language access for its members, and have matured from having one lone in-house translator to running a loc team of five, who processed some 1.5m words in Q1 2020 alone.Links to the stories discussed Slator 2020 Language Industry Market Reporthttps://slator.com/data-research/slator-2020-language-industry-market-report/Presbyterian Church (USA): From One Heroic Translator to Full Localizationhttps://slator.com/features/presbyterian-church-usa-from-one-heroic-translator-to-full-localization/Lilt Raised USD 25m Just Before Pandemic Hithttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/lilt-raised-usd-25m-just-before-pandemic-hit/Media Localizer Plint Sells Majority to PE Firm Priveqhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/media-localizer-plint-sells-majority-to-pe-firm-priveq/