UAE-based language service provider Tarjama has raised $5 million in a Series A round. The investment was led by Saudi Arabia-based Anova Investments.

The investment will go primarily towards developing its Ureed platform, an online marketplace focusing on translation and content services and to launch its specialised Arabic machine translation engine.

“We will be investing in digitising and automating our services and process…including natural language processing for machine translation,” said Nour Al Hassan, founder and chief executive officer at Tarjama. “There is huge demand for Arabic content and translation and we’re expanding and positioning our marketplace as a disruptor in the fields of content and translation services.”

The company will also expand its offering of languages to more than 150 and further expand to the Saudi market.

“We will leverage our inhouse translation capabilities to build a machine translation engine for Arabic, allowing us to offer high quality machine translation and human post-editing services,” said Al Hassan.