The impetus for its development was that ABBYY LS had "felt constrained by translation technologies that had existed for the last 15 years" and wanted an "intuitive, cloud-based, scalable, and powerful" solution that would let them manage projects with dozens of collaborators, including project managers, translators, editors, and other professionals.”[1] In 2016, Smartcat spun out of ABBYY LS to become a separate company and attracted $2.8 million in investments from Ilya Shirokov (ex-CEO at Odnoklassniki and founder of Yandex-acquired social network MoiKrug.ru).

[2] ABBYY LS’s founder and CEO Ivan Smolnikov also left the company to fully focus on Smartcat.

Unlike most industry tools, Smartcat does not charge for user-based licenses, because it believes that counting seats just doesn’t fit in the translation business, where more than 90% of users in companies are freelancers and a varying number of them collaborate on projects on a daily basis.”[1] Instead, Smartcat’s monetization is primarily based on a percentage-based service fee on top of vendors’ own rates.

Smartcat also offers paid subscriptions with some additional features, as well as vendor management and localization engineering support.

The connected translation model is made up of five key concepts: connectivity, translation, scalability, management, and automated payments:[7] Smartcat’s built-in CAT editor supports 70+ input formats, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, scanned documents and images (including a paid OCR service), HTML pages, resource files, industry-standard bilingual formats, and others.