Xcelerator hoping to speed things up in 2013

Irish IT entrepreneur Tony O’Dowd has received an early Christmas present after his latest start-up venture Xcelerator secured €1.2 million in funding from a syndicate of investors led by Delta Partners and including Enterprise Ireland.

Xcelerator, established last year, provides translation services via the cloud to language-service providers.

Clients just need a web browser to access its services, which the company claims makes it easy to use and inexpensive. All languages are available.

Xcelerator currently has 354 clients registered, and using its KantanMT.complatform.

Clients include Roundtable Inc, which is based in Argentina and provides services to Microsoft, Symantec and IBM.

Xcelerator has yet to generate any revenue, with clients currently operating on free trials.

O’Dowd said a charging model would be introduced in the first quarter of next year. “We have to pitch the price to match the benefits that our customers get,” O’Dowd told me this week.

This is O'Dowd's second spin around the track as a company founder. In 2008 he sold his Alchemy Software Development company to Translations.comfor a undisclosed sum.

After a three-year earn out, O’Dowd took 12 months out to research the idea behind Xcelerator. “I built a prototype during the year and started going to investors in June .”

O’Dowd has also put €300,000 of his own money into the venture.

Will he be competing with Google Translate and Bing Translator (owned by Microsoft)?

“Not necessarily. They’re used mostly for single web pages. None of our clients translate single pages. They all translate thousands of pages, sometimes very technical in nature. We’re targeting the corporate market.”

O’Dowd said the funds would be used to boost its headcount to 25 by the end of next year (it currently has five staff) and to 45 by the end of 2015.

“We’ll be opening a sales and marketing office in Galway on January 7th, and that will be our worldwide sales base. We really hope to take off in 2013.”