Lisbon, July 2, 2026 (Lusa) - The creditors present at the meeting held at the Lisbon District Court on Thursday unanimously approved the closure and liquidation of Unbabel.
According to the judge presiding over the insolvency proceedings, the company was liquidated after submitting no recovery plan, and it owes approximately 36 creditors approximately €15.5 million.
The Portuguese start-up Unbabel, which specialises in AI-powered machine translation, was declared insolvent on 10 March, after receiving €14.1 million from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) to develop a project.
According to Jornal de Negócios, the company fulfilled all the commitments it had undertaken under the RRP, but the expenditure incurred and certified fell short of the contracted amount, forcing it to return an excess of around €1.3 million.
IAPMEI, the Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation, responsible for managing part of the European funds, appears on the list of 31 creditors with the status of a preferential creditor, but Wuessen, a financial company based in Luxembourg and one of Unbabel’s main investors, contests this claim.
Wuessen holds a claim of €2.4 million and a pledge over a Unbabel bank account, which, in principle, places the recovery of its claim ahead of that of the other creditors.
The composition of Unbabel’s creditors’ committee, voted on during today’s meeting, was also contested by Wuessen’s representatives.
Following a proposal by the largest creditors, the venture capital funds Iberis Bluetech Fund II and Iberis Bluetech Fund III, with claims of €4.2 million and €7.2 million respectively, the creditors’ committee will be chaired by a representative from Iberis, the Social Security Institute and the Buenavista Equity Partner Portugal fund.
Although the creditors’ meeting approved the proposal by a majority, Wuessen challenged the decision, arguing that the Buenavista fund’s interests “are not aligned with those of the other creditors” because it is not itself a creditor of Unbabel, according to the representatives.
In fact, the insolvency practitioner, Pedro Pidwell, recognised Buenavista’s claims.
Months before the insolvency, the Buenavista Equity Partners fund brought legal proceedings in Portugal, seeking €12.75 million, to annul the sale of Unbabel Inc.'s (the parent company of the Portuguese Unbabel) assets to the US firm TransPerfect, which took place in August last year.
The fund has argued that the transaction, carried out at a price it considered far too low, made it challenging to recoup the sums invested in the company.
Unbabel began to lose clients as its products were gradually replaced by more affordable generative AI solutions, and filed for insolvency at the Lisbon District Court earlier this year.
Long regarded as one of the most promising national tech start-ups, it was the driving force behind one of the RRP’s key initiatives – the “Centre for Responsible AI” – but Sword Health replaced it following the sale to TransPerfect.
At the end of the creditors’ meeting, following the decision to wind up the company (which was already inactive and had no employees), the founder, Vasco Pedro, addressed the court to thank the investors who had believed in Unbabel’s potential for 12 years.
He also expressed his feelings about the challenging outcome of the proceedings, declaring himself “defeated by Artificial Intelligence”.
CT/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
