Straker Brand Guidelines: Auckland 1999, an ASX Listing, IBM and the Arbitr Name

A one-person technology firm that became a translation company.

Straker began in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1999. The New Zealand Herald reported in April 2015 that Grant Straker left his job that year to start his own technology company, at first as its only employee, and that Merryn Straker soon joined to take on accounting and client project management. The two are the company’s co-founders. In the early years Merryn Straker was chief executive and Grant Straker chief technology officer; the Herald said that as the company grew he moved into the chief executive role and she became chief operating officer.

By 2015 the business was trading as Straker Translations, which the Herald described as a cloud-enabled translation company working into and out of more than 100 languages, with two main production centres in Barcelona and Auckland, sales offices around the world and a total of 50 staff. The founder’s surname was the brand, and the word “translations” told buyers what it did.

The company went public in Australia rather than at home. ASX company data gives a listing date of 22 October 2018 on the Australian Securities Exchange, where Straker Limited traded under the code STG while remaining incorporated in New Zealand. ASX data still describes the issuer’s activity as translation services.

The founders explained the division of roles to the Herald in business terms: Grant Straker said fast-growing technology companies tend to do well when led by someone with a technology background, while Merryn Straker’s organisational skills drove the platform and the staff as the company grew. Both were still running the business at the time of that 2015 interview.

Named software and an IBM agreement.

Straker’s products carry their own names. A company announcement of 2025 refers to Tiri, which Straker calls its proprietary platform, and Microsoft’s connector documentation lists Straker Verify, a preview connector for Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Logic Apps and Power Apps that links workflows to Straker’s AI verification services for translation requests, localisation and content validation. Microsoft lists it as a premium connector in Copilot Studio, Power Apps and Power Automate, as well as in Logic Apps Standard.

The largest relationship the company has described is with IBM. In an announcement dated 30 October 2025, Straker said it had been appointed IBM’s Strategic Translation Service Provider from January 2021, that IBM extended that agreement in November 2022, and that IBM had renewed it for a further three years from 1 January 2026, with an option for one more year. The same announcement said about 10,000 IBM users were working with Straker’s Slack translation application, that the relationship would be managed mainly through IBM Japan, and that the two companies were jointly developing small language models on IBM Cloud using IBM’s watsonx technology and Tiri.

The consumer side of the business still uses the old name. In November 2026 the Straker Translations website offered certified translations of personal and business documents, including translations prepared for the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates and the Medical Council of Canada, as well as interpreting and media localisation, under a copyright line for Straker Limited.

The scale figures on the current corporate site are the company’s own. Arbitr’s About page in 2026 claims more than 25 years of multi-market content publishing, more than 120 language pairs, more than 50 million words translated each month and more than 10,000 IBM users each month, and it labels each of those figures as verified.

How language companies present themselves.

Translation and localisation companies sell a service that is hard to picture, so their public material tends to lean on numbers and names. RWS describes a network of more than 250,000 data specialists and language experts in its regulatory announcements, and TransPerfect’s standard press-release text, as used in 2026, lists offices in more than 150 cities on six continents and services in more than 200 languages. For a designer, those counts work as a kind of map: the reach of the company is shown through cities, countries and languages rather than through a product on a shelf.

Platform names carry much of the identity. RWS keeps Trados, a translation-memory tool it gained through its 2020 merger with SDL, as a product brand, and in March 2026 added Language Weaver Pro, an AI translation model it says was built with Cohere. TransPerfect gathers its software under GlobalLink, with GlobalLink Media for subtitling and dubbing. This guide describes them only as their makers do.

The companies also explain themselves through their structure. RWS sorts its reports into three named segments, Generate, Transform and Protect, while TransPerfect runs divisions such as TransPerfect Media, TransPerfect Gaming and TransPerfect Legal Solutions under one compound name. Acquired businesses can be renamed into these families: Moravia, bought by RWS in 2017, became RWS Moravia in 2018, and RWS completed its purchase of Acolad’s parent company in November 2026.

Corporate pages on owners and offices are part of the same picture. A listed company such as RWS publishes its headquarters, market and deals through regulatory announcements; a private one such as TransPerfect states its global and regional headquarters in its press releases. This guide follows those documents, and marks plainly what rests on a company’s own word.

Renamed Arbitr in 2026.

In 2026 the listed company took a new name. Its corporate site, in a page first published in August 2026 and updated in October 2026, describes Arbitr Group Limited, formerly Straker Limited, as incorporated in New Zealand and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code AGT, and ASX company data now shows the issuer as Arbitr Group Limited. The former Straker web addresses redirect to the Arbitr site, which carries a notice that “Straker is now Arbitr”.

The new name comes with a new description. Arbitr calls itself an AI-native content governance company that checks a business’s content against its own approved claims, terminology and market rules, in any language, and it names a product called Cortex. The company says the name comes from the Latin arbiter, and that it builds on IBM watsonx as an IBM Platinum Partner. Its leadership page lists co-chief executives David Sowerby and Indy Nagpal and the chair Linda Jenkinson, with headquarters in Auckland and offices in Philadelphia, Barcelona and Tokyo.

The story Arbitr tells links the new business to the old one. The About page says its experts checked disclosures, filings, product claims and pricing statements by hand for twenty-five years, for every market and language, and that the platform turns that record into rules. In its description, routine changes to a client’s content go through, changes that break a rule are held with the rule named, and the change is sent to the person who owns it.

For a design guide, Straker shows how a translation brand built on a founder’s surname can give way to a new name at group level while it continues as a consumer storefront: the listed company now speaks as Arbitr, while Straker Translations still sells certified translations. Compare DeepL, which grew out of a machine-translation service, and Translated. For this guide we use kauri green, harbour grey and flax gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Straker’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.