DCU spin-out raises €400K and announces 15 new jobs

Iconic Translation Machines, a leading Irish translation software company and Dublin City University spin-out, today announced that it is creating 15 new jobs at its headquarters in Glasnevin, Dublin. The positions will be filled by December 2016 and will bring the total employment at the company up to 25.

Iconic provides cloud-based translation solutions to language service and translation companies and targets a language industry that is worth in excess of €37 billion annually . Its flagship product automates the translation of intellectual property documents.

Founded in 2013 by Dr. John Tinsley and Dr. Páraic Sheridan, Iconic’s advanced proprietary technology was born from almost a decade of research and development at the CNGL Centre at Dublin City University into developing a unique approach to machine translation with subject matter expertise for highly specialist and technical domains.

The company is in a prime position to grow after a successful seed funding round of over €400,000 from a number of investors including Enterprise Ireland, and business angel investment from Bloom Equity and the Boole Investment Syndicate through the Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN).

The majority of the new, highly technical roles will be allocated to machine translation specialists and software engineers, with some positions in sales and marketing. Iconic is looking to grow its presence in the financial services and life sciences sectors, following considerable success in the intellectual property field.

Welocalize, one of the top ten global language service providers, has already implemented Iconic’s translation automation service across its offices in US and China.

Speaking about the announcement, Dr. John Tinsley, CEO, Iconic, said: “This announcement is testament to our success to date and ambitious growth plans. Our team of experts has created machine translation solutions for content which had been considered too technical and challenging for automated translation. We are excited about the strong growth we have already achieved in delivering translation technology to the very complex intellectual property and financial services sectors.

“Our support network, including Enterprise Ireland, DCU, and HBAN, as well as the angels in the Boole and Bloom syndicates have been so helpful. Obviously they bring much needed funding, but more importantly they bring years of practical business expertise and advice which adds so much value as we plot the next critical steps on our growth journey.”

Welcoming the news Richard Stokes Director of Innovation at DCU said, “We are delighted at the impressive progress that Iconic has made, which demonstrates how knowledge intensive spin-out companies based on state investment in research can contribute significantly to employment growth.”