“We should have the platform available in 4 weeks!”, our investor told us at the travel booking platform we were building. Then he added, "It must be available in 24 languages." Our team at the time was experienced in developing software for fast-growing startups, but this kind of pace in internationalization was rapid even for us. Our search for a product that could facilitate the localization of our software at this scale was fruitless. Finally, we decided to build an application to enable our translators to localize our web templates in-place while browsing our booking platform. The in-place editing instantly sped up our process and eventually became the foundation of our In-Context Editor.

We showed it to fellow developers and received lots of positive feedback, and they told us that they would love to use it in their projects. So, in late 2011 the idea to build a localization platform from the tools we had created blossomed into a prototype for Phrase.

This is what we are here for and will continue to do: We constantly aim to eliminate unnecessary steps from localization processes and make software localization simpler in every way. Phrase is growing rapidly and now serves hundreds of businesses in over 60 countries.

A year later we had a growing number of customers, and we expanded the tool to become a platform, offering API clients, integration tools and workflow support for the complete localization process. Our objective became clear: We need to solve localization for software developers and strive for even simpler solutions for the typical tasks of localization managers and translators of software alike.