Frontier Capital has made an investment in MultiLing, a translation services provider specialising in intellectual property (IP) and technical materials for global enterprises.
Frontier’s USD10.3m minority equity investment in MultiLing provides growth capital to support the company’s continued expansion. The company will continue to be led by Michael Sneddon, chief executive officer; Lyle Ball, chief operating officer; and Todd Rapier, executive vice president of sales.
“MultiLing is a well-established company with a strong management team and a unique translation model long at work with enterprises such as Procter & Gamble, Dow Corning, and Yokohama Rubber,” says Michael Ramich, partner, Frontier Capital. “This made MultiLing an ideal company in which to invest, as it looks to grow market share worldwide with multinational companies requiring the highest quality patent and technical translations.”
MultiLing has more than 1,400 employees and contractors, and more than half of the company’s in-country native-speaking translators hold either a PhD or master’s degree in scientific fields relevant to global enterprises. MultiLing best serves enterprises with highly technical requirements, focusing on patents, litigation and prosecution needs, as well as technical materials such as software, manuals and websites. The company’s enterprise clients have annual translation budgets exceeding USD10m to protect their ideas around the world.
There are seven global MultiLing offices in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Peru and the US. Its centralised translation model offers a single point of contact for managing client projects with highly specialised teams, terminology management, translation memory, quality control and proprietary technology.
“Over the last few years, we’ve seen double digit growth in our business,” Sneddon says. “This growth comes from a continued increase in the number of US, European and Asian enterprises spending millions of dollars per year on translations despite the global economic downturn.”
To accommodate this growth, the 25-year-old company – which translates technical materials in more than 80 languages in 120+ countries – has made significant investments over the last two years, including expanding its corporate leadership and sales team worldwide and moving its corporate headquarters to a larger office in Provo, Utah.
“With this investment from Frontier, we expect to be able to more quickly enhance our services in countries such as China, Japan and South Korea to accommodate the region’s dramatically increasing volume of patent filings to and from the US and Europe,” Ball says.
