Paris-based startup Textmaster has raised another €1 Million from its traditional investors (Alven Capital, Fabrice Grinda, eFounders, Geoffroy Bragadir), and has added Webedia co-founder Cédric Siré to the board. Textmaster provides a variety of content services – translation, content generation, writing, etc. – and provides a “qualified crowdsourced” marketplace, as co-founder Thibault Lougnon called it in an interview with Frenchweb.
As a content creator myself, I have trouble believing in the viability of a business model based on exchange of services which start at $.02/word; however, Textmaster already works with Google (Zagat), Webedia, Quicksilver, LVMH (Benefits) & Undiz.
More interestingly, Textmaster is raising just €1 Million, after raising €1.6 Million back in November 2012 – one can imagine that the metrics that matter haven’t moved as quickly as they were hoping. I noticed the same thing earlier this year with another SMB SaaS company, Mailjet, who raised €2.2 Million in March after raising €2.5 Million in November 2012.
Of course, rounds like these could be simple bridge financing, but my gut tells me that these companies aren’t living up to the expectations (and the competition) of 2012. Textmaster’s translation marketplace has to be revenue-intensive enough for the supply to invest in using the service (a core group of hardcore translators & content creators, combined with a larger group of casual users), as well as a group of consistent clients with constant content creation/localization needs.
Today, Textmaster boasts 50 Million words translated – a hard number to put into context, I would’ve preferred to know how many content creators or how much revenue was generated for content creators (potentially $1 Million, given the minimum price per word).