Babylon (software) - History

History

In 1995, Israeli entrepreneur Amnon Ovadia began a project for an online English–Hebrew dictionary which would not interrupt the reading process. As a result, Babylon Ltd. was founded in 1997 and launched the first version of Babylon. On 25 September 1997, the company filed a patent for text recognition and translation. In 1998, a year following its launch date, Babylon had two million users, mostly in Germany and Brazil, growing from 420,000 to 2.5 million users in the course of that year. In the same year, Formula Systems, headed by Dan Goldstein, acquired Mashov Computers and became the largest shareholder in the company. By 2000, the product had over 4 million users.In the spring of 2000, Babylon Ltd. failed to raise $20 million in a private placement and lost NIS 15 million. Further stress came with the collapse of the Dot-com bubble. In 2001, Babylon Ltd. continued shedding money, with the company costing its parent company Formula Vision NIS 4.7 million.

Since 2007, Babylon Ltd. (TASE: BBYL) has been a publicly traded company. Its IPO took place in February 2007; Israeli businessman Noam Lanir purchased controlling interests in the company for $10.5 million, sharing management with second majority shareholder Reed Elsevier and the Company founder Amnon Ovadia. According to Globes magazine in January 2011, Lanir received an offer for his stake from a foreign private equity fund that valued the company at NIS 248 million (approximately 70 million dollars).

In 2008–2009, Babylon reported earnings of NIS 50 million through its collaboration with Google. In 2010, Google Ireland signed an extended cooperation agreement with Babylon to provide it with online search and pay-per-click advertising services.