Augustin Prot

Augustin Prot is co-founder and chief executive of Weglot, a French company whose software translates websites and keeps the translated pages visible to search engines. A former mergers and acquisitions banker at Lazard, he is known for growing Weglot from a WordPress plugin into a translation service for tens of thousands of websites while raising almost no outside money for six years.

From Lazard to website translation

He spent three years in mergers and acquisitions and enjoyed it, until, as he told SlatorPod, “At some point, I started to get bored.” While testing ideas of his own he met Rémy Berda, an engineer whose first startup, a classifieds app, had just shut down. Berda had found ready-made services for most technical problems but nothing that made a website multilingual in minutes.

“When I was in banking, I did not know anything about translation or web,” Prot said. “I was sold from day one. I do not know how to code, so how could I help? I found users and saw if it was working and if people liked it.” They started Weglot in 2016, with Berda as chief technology officer.

Finding users on WordPress and Shopify

Early users wanted two things: setup without a developer, and translated pages that search engines could see, which ruled out translating on the fly in the visitor’s browser. Weglot found its first traction as a WordPress plugin, then on Shopify, and later worked on any website. In 2020, as shops moved online during the pandemic, Weglot doubled its users, he told TechRound.

Six years on a small seed round

Weglot raised a €450,000 seed round in 2017 and nothing more until 2022, when Partech Growth invested €45 million. He said the company was at about €10 million in revenue and wanted partners who could help it reach €50 million or €100 million without turning it into “a cash burner.” His goal has stayed the same since the first pitch: “Our goal is that Weglot is the translation feature for website translation.”