Smartcat

Smartcat was originally developed as a CAT tool in 2012–2015 as an in-house solution by ABBYY Language Solutions (ABBYY LS), a linguistic service provider within the ABBYY group of companies. The impetus for its development was that ABBYY LS had "felt constrained by translation technologies that had existed for the last 15 years" and wanted an "intuitive, cloud-based, scalable, and powerful" solution that would let them manage projects with dozens of collaborators, including project managers, translators, editors, and other professionals.” In 2016, Smartcat spun out of ABBYY LS to become a separate company and attracted $2.8 million in investments from Ilya Shirokov (ex-CEO at Odnoklassniki and founder of Yandex-acquired social network MoiKrug.ru). ABBYY LS’s founder and CEO Ivan Smolnikov also left the company to fully focus on Smartcat. The main reasons for the separation were that the "translation automation business turned out to be far from complementary to the services of language services providers" and that “some translation companies had been wary of using a service developed by a competitor.” As of September 2020, the platform has more than 350,000 freelancers in its marketplace and provides an “app store” that allows users to integrate their Smartcat account with third-party tools. Although Smartcat has an in-built CAT tool that helps translators work faster and more efficiently, its reach and functionality are much broader than that of a CAT tool. It is an all-in-one translation platform connecting businesses and translation professionals while offering additional services like payment automation, a combination the company brands as “Connected Translation”.