DeepL is a German Artificial intelligence research company specializing in language AI. Its platform includes DeepL Translator, a neural machine translation service; DeepL Voice, a real-time speech translation product; and DeepL Agent, an AI agent that can autonomously plan workflows and operate office systems in response to natural language instructions. The company's algorithm is based on the Transformer (architecture) architecture, a type of Deep learning model. DeepL offers a free tier with limited features and a paid subscription, DeepL Pro, which provides additional capabilities and access to its translation application programming interface. Founded in 2017 by Jaroslaw Kutylowski, DeepL is a unicorn, valued at $2 billion after a Series C funding round raised $300 million in May 2024. Its more than 200,000 business customers include a large proportion of the Fortune 500.
History
The translating system was first developed within Linguee, a dictionary website, by a team led by Chief Technology Officer Jarosław Kutyłowski in 2016. It launched as DeepL Translator on 28 August 2017, offering translations between English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Dutch. At launch, the company claimed it surpassed competitors in blind tests and BLEU scores, including Google Translate, Amazon Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Facebook's translation feature. With the release of DeepL, Linguee's company name changed to DeepL GmbH, and it is financed by advertising on its sister site, linguee.com. Support for Portuguese and Russian was added on 5 December 2018. In July 2019, Kutyłowski became CEO and restructured the company into a Societas Europaea in 2021. Desktop software for Microsoft Windows and macOS was released in September 2019. Support for Chinese (simplified) and Japanese was added on 19 March 2020, with claims of surpassing competitors including Baidu and Youdao. In March 2021, 13 more European languages were added: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish, bringing the total to 24. Support for Indonesian and Turkish followed on 25 May 2022, and Ukrainian on 14 September 2022. In January 2023, the company reached a valuation of €1 billion, becoming the most valued startup in Cologne, and added Korean and Norwegian (Bokmål) at the end of the month. In May 2024, DeepL announced a $300 million investment. In January 2026, more languages were supported, including Luxembourgish and Irish.
Services
Translation method
DeepL Translator uses a proprietary algorithm with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on the Linguee database. According to developers, the service employs a newer, improved neural network architecture, resulting in more natural-sounding translations than competitors. The translation is generated using a supercomputer that reaches 5.1 petaflops, operated in Iceland with hydropower. DeepL's data centers are located at the EcoDataCenter in Falun, Sweden, a sustainability-focused facility. CNNs are generally suited for long coherent word sequences but have not been widely used by competitors due to weaknesses compared to recurrent neural networks. DeepL compensates for these weaknesses with supplemental techniques, some publicly known.
Translator and subscription
The free translator has a maximum limit of 1,500 characters per translation. It can translate Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files in Office Open XML formats (.docx and .pptx) and PDF files up to 5MB. DeepL Pro, available since March 2018, includes API access and a plug-in for computer-assisted translation tools like SDL Trados Studio. Unlike the free version, Pro does not save translated texts on the server and removes the character limit. The monthly pricing includes a set amount of text, with additional text billed per character.
#### Supported languages
As of July 2026, the translation service supports numerous languages, including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and others.
DeepL Write
In November 2022, DeepL launched DeepL Write, a tool to improve monolingual texts in English and German. The public beta was released on 17 January 2023. In summer 2024, French and Spanish were added; by January 2024, Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Italian were also included.
DeepL Voice
DeepL Voice, a real-time speech translation product, launched in November 2024. It includes DeepL Voice for Meetings, add-ons for Microsoft Teams and Zoom that render translated speech as on-screen captions, and DeepL Voice for Conversations, a mobile tool for in-person discussions. In April 2026, DeepL introduced voice-to-voice translation in more than 40 languages, using a speech-to-text-to-speech pipeline.
DeepL Agent
In November 2025, DeepL launched DeepL Agent, an AI agent capable of operating business applications in a human-like manner.
Reception
Reception of DeepL has been generally positive. TechCrunch appreciated its accuracy, stating it was more accurate and nuanced than Google Translate. Le Monde thanked developers for translating French text into more "French-sounding" expressions. RTL Z said DeepL Translator "offers better translations […] when it comes to Dutch to English and vice versa". La Repubblica and Latin American website "WWWhat's new?" also praised it. A 2018 paper by the University of Bologna evaluating Italian-to-German translation found preliminary results similar in quality to Google Translate. In September 2021, Slator noted the language industry response was more measured than press coverage but that DeepL remained highly regarded by users. A 2018 reviewer noted DeepL had far fewer languages than competitors. A 2025 research paper introducing the WMT24++ benchmark, expanding evaluation to 55 languages and dialects, found that frontier Large language models, including OpenAI's o1, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini, ranked above traditional machine-translation systems like DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft Translator. The authors noted rankings were based on automatic metrics and human evaluation remained future work.
Awards and honors
DeepL won the 2020 Webby Award for Best Practices and the 2020 Webby Award for Technical Achievement (Apps, Mobile, and Features), both in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice. In April 2025, DeepL received additional recognition, though specific details are not provided here.