Unbabel investor challenges sale of start-up to TransPerfect
A Spanish fund filed a €12.75 million lawsuit in Portuguese court against Unbabel and TransPerfect after the deal was completed, which resulted in a "total loss" for many of the investors.
The sale of Unbabel has reached the courts. A few days before Christmas, Buenavista Equity Partners, which had invested in the Portuguese start-up, filed a lawsuit against the deal that left the start-up in the hands of the American company TransPerfect.
Publicly available information on the Citius portal, consulted by ECO, shows that the lawsuit filed by this Madrid-based fund was filed in the Lisbon District Court, in the Central Civil Court, on 23 December, in the amount of €12.75 million. Among the defendants are Unbabel itself, TransPerfect and Wuessen Lending, a company based in Luxembourg.
According to Citius, the case in question is a “pauliana action”, a type of challenge “that allows creditors to contest, through the courts, contracts entered into by debtors that result in damage to the legitimate interests of creditors”, explains the legal dictionary of the Diário da República.
It was not possible to consult the case before this news was published, but the description suggests an attempt to challenge the sale of Unbabel in court by one of its former shareholders.
When contacted to explain the content of the case against Unbabel, an official source at Buenavista replied that it would not make “any comments on this matter”. Similarly, ECO asked TransPerfect to comment through its Lisbon office, but received no response. Unbabel founder Vasco Pedro also declined to comment.
Investors lost everything
The sale of Unbabel to TransPerfect was publicly announced in August 2025 – but, as ECO revealed in September, it resulted in a “total loss” for many investors.
Despite being publicly regarded as one of the country’s most promising tech start-ups, Unbabel was hanging by a thread, losing customers to generative AI solutions without human intervention, which were more affordable. Two restructurings, carried out in October 2024 and January 2025, were unable to steer the company to another destination.
Between June 2024 and June 2025, Unbabel’s turnover plummeted 45.6% to €8.541 million. In addition, Unbabel posted a negative operating result (EBITDA) for four consecutive quarters, which exceeded €12.5 million in the last quarter of 2024, improving to -€4.341 million at the end of June this year, following a restructuring process carried out at the beginning of the year, according to information obtained by ECO.
Buenavista Equity Partners’ challenge to the deal with TransPerfect thus opens a new chapter in the history of the Portuguese translation start-up founded in 2013, which reached 2025 valued at around €300 million, according to ECO, but ended up being sold to a much larger competitor for “a relatively low price”.
Wuessen Lending was Unbabel’s senior secured creditor and played a key role in the sale of Unbabel’s assets to TransPerfect at a time when the start-up was under intense financial pressure, ECO has learned. This debt had been incurred by Unbabel with Silicon Valley Bank, which went bankrupt in March 2023, to acquire two companies in Germany and Israel.
