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While ethical concerns about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) are being discussed elsewhere, one company in Berlin is developing into the model of German AI start-ups.

The company founded by Christopher Kränzler, Philipp Koch-Büttner and Alexander Gigga offers software that translates texts.

Lengoo has grown in the past few months - from 37 employees at the end of 2019 to almost 80 employees.

In the middle of the Corona crisis.

Where does this growth come from?

Kränzler: "Due to the current need to save costs, many companies are currently looking for sensible solutions."

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AI and machine learning have to do with automation and thus also with savings.

Using his technology in companies could cut translation costs by 50 percent, he says.

Redalpine has invested in Lengoo

The founder studied industrial engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (KIT) and data science at Columbia University New York.

He founded Lengoo together with Koch-Büttner and Gigga in 2014.

The team completed a Series A round with six million euros last year.

The sponsor was Redalpine and the existing investors Creathor Ventures and Piton Capital.

Since June 2019, Kränzler has been a member of the main board of the Bitkom industry association, which is promoting digitization in Germany.

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In this position and as head of an AI start-up, Kränzler sees himself as having a special responsibility.

He wants to show that it is possible to earn money with a German AI product and to be internationally successful.

Instead of dealing with negative issues relating to artificial intelligence, says Kränzler, politicians should rather "show use cases of how companies have successfully used AI and got through the current crisis".

Lengoo translates texts for Sixt and HelloFresh

His start-up is a good example, says Kränzler.

Lengoo develops AI that translates manuals, marketing texts and contracts, for example.

The individualized AI models are self-learning.

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The technology is designed in such a way, says Kränzler, that it will get better and better over time and that the human translator will have to correct fewer and fewer errors.

According to Kränzler, the global market for translation services is currently estimated at over 40 billion US dollars.

According to Lengoo, it has around 3000 customers.

This includes companies in German-speaking countries, Great Britain and Scandinavia.

Among them are well-known companies such as Sixt, Sunrise Communications, HelloFresh and the WWF.

Compared to translation programs like Deepl or Google Translate, Lengoo trains models with the language data of corporate customers.

The more past translations a company brings in, the better the tool works.