Deven Orie and the distance between hearing and understanding

Before Deven Orie set out to help sports fans understand a broadcast in another language, he built an app to help students work out where everybody was. Kipper offered a live map of a college campus, anonymous conversation and a way to find events. It addressed an ordinary predicament: the interesting thing might be happening somewhere else.

Years later, the predicament has acquired a larger map. A tennis match can reach a television in Spain while its commentary remains in English. A German hockey game can travel to North America with an account of the action that many viewers cannot follow. Distribution has done its job. Understanding still needs a little assistance.

Orie, the New York co-founder and CEO of Lingopal, has made that remaining distance his business. With co-founder Casey Schneider, he is building translation software for live and recorded speech. The ambition involves voices, timing and the rather awkward fact that human beings rarely speak as neatly as a translation exercise would prefer.

The campus came first

Orie came from Queens and studied economics and computer science at Dartmouth, where he belonged to the class of 2019. By his junior year, his career plans were changing. He had imagined becoming a software engineer at a large technology company. Product management was beginning to appeal to him.

In a 2017 conversation about technology interviews, he described the value of people who could code and also “think in the minds of consumers.” The phrase is slightly ungainly, but the instinct is clear. Making something work and understanding why somebody would use it belonged in the same conversation.

Kipper gave that instinct an unusually social test. Its advertised features included finding parties, posting events, checking busy campus spaces and chatting anonymously. A student could consult a map before committing to the walk. Software had been recruited into the ancient undergraduate business of finding better company.

The app’s proposition was concrete enough to explain without a diagram. A campus has places and people. Their locations change. Put useful information in someone’s hand while they can still act on it. There is a family resemblance to Orie’s later work: information loses some of its value when it arrives after the moment has passed.

Learning the machinery, finding a partner

Orie went on to work in product management at Microsoft, with experience in cloud and AI. That put him close to the infrastructure on which modern software depends. A consumer may see a button or hear a voice; behind it sits a procession of services, decisions and delays.

His work also took him to StubHub. There, he and Schneider worked together for roughly a year before starting their own company. Schneider brought experience from Tesla and became Lingopal’s chief technology officer. Orie became CEO. They founded the business in 2023.

That shared workplace matters more than the familiar recital of previous employers. Starting a company requires choosing somebody with whom to make decisions under conditions that are unlikely to improve one’s manners. Working together first provides a little evidence. It is a more useful introduction than matching biographies on a pitch slide.

By January 2024, the pair were discussing their startup on the Thinking Machines podcast. The conversation’s agenda included the difference between enterprise and consumer AI, the difficulty of translation, research inside product companies and reliance on open source. Those are revealing preoccupations for a young business: who the customer is, what must be built, and which parts of the machinery can be trusted.

A person asking a phone for a translated sentence can pause and try again. A broadcaster carrying a live event has a different obligation. The program continues while the software works. Orie’s enterprise focus puts the product inside somebody else’s deadline.

A tennis match makes the argument

In September 2024, Tennis Channel gave the idea a defined assignment. During the Guadalajara Open Akron in Mexico, its English commentary would be translated into Spanish for viewers of its channel in Spain. Lingopal supplied translation, with Amagi participating in delivery. The tournament ran from September 9 to 15.

The arrangement made the geography almost comically efficient: a match in Mexico, commentary in English, an audience in Spain. The pictures could make the journey easily enough. The conversation around them needed another route.

Tennis Channel described the project as a beta and sought audience feedback. It also planned on-screen alerts identifying AI-translated material. These details give the experiment its human scale. A viewer was being invited to try a new way of hearing the game, with an explanation of what had changed.

For Orie, sport provides an unforgiving demonstration. Commentary contains proper names, abrupt changes of pace and specialist vocabulary. Excitement affects delivery. An intelligible translation has to keep enough of that experience intact to remain worth listening to. A perfectly respectable sentence can still be poor company during a rally.

Lingopal also translated German commentary on Berlin Eisbären hockey into English for North American broadcasts, a deployment described by AEG Sports. Tennis and hockey make different demands on the ear. Both turn the product’s purpose into a simple question: can another audience follow what is happening while it still matters?

The seconds are part of the product

In February 2025, Lingopal announced a $14 million Series A led by DCM Ventures, with Scrum Ventures and Marquee Ventures participating. The stated uses included research, development and expansion into new markets. The funding gave Orie resources to pursue a problem whose difficulty increases when the demonstration becomes a regular service.

At the time, Lingopal described six AI models built in-house and support for more than 120 languages. Its announcement cited latency below two seconds on its smallest models. That qualification matters. The speed of one model and the delay experienced by a viewer describe different parts of the journey.

Orie’s research priorities included reducing compute requirements as well as delay. The pairing is practical. A service that runs continuously has to earn its keep continuously, too. Faster output and cheaper operation affect whether a broadcaster can add another language repeatedly, rather than reserve it for a special occasion.

There is an economics graduate’s problem tucked inside the engineering. A broadcaster has already paid for a production and assembled an audience in one language. Another language offers a way to put that existing work before more people. The proposal becomes attractive when the extra operation is manageable and the result remains enjoyable.

“Live sports should feel live for everyone, regardless of the language you speak.”

Deven Orie, Sports Loft Summit, 2025

In June 2025, Orie took that argument to the Sports Loft Summit in London. He was among presenters selected for a gathering of sports and media executives and investors. The audience was well placed to ask the inconvenient follow-up: how would this fit into the way an actual broadcast gets made?

His formulation keeps the viewer in the sentence. A fan cares about hearing the action at the right moment. The number of models, their architecture and the investment behind them can wait until the interval. Orie’s job is to make the technical work serve that fairly reasonable impatience.

Then the lecture kept going

By 2026, the company’s work was receiving recognition within broadcasting. In April, its Real-Time Live Translation product won a NAB Show Product of the Year award in the Intelligent category. The award belonged to a product combining translation with voice generation or cloning, captions and speaker detection.

Another development later that year returned the story to a setting closer to Orie’s student days. In September, Lingopal announced a collaboration with CS50, Harvard’s introductory computer science course, beginning with Portuguese and Spanish. Here the material was a lecture, and the difficult clock measured hours of teaching.

CS50’s classes can extend beyond two hours, within a body of lecture material exceeding 20 hours and changing over time. Human subtitle translation had proved difficult to sustain at that volume. Some automated alternatives also imposed duration limits. Long lessons were a practical obstacle, regardless of how impressive a short translated clip might sound.

The educational use gives Orie’s business a different kind of audience. A sports viewer wants to stay with the match. A learner wants to stay with an explanation, perhaps returning to it when a concept refuses to cooperate. Translation has to accompany the useful thing for as long as it lasts.

It would be too tidy to turn a campus app into a prophecy of everything that followed. Kipper was a particular product for particular students. Lingopal is a company with enterprise customers, investors and a different technical task. The continuity lies in a question Orie has kept making practical: who could take part if a little less stood between them and the experience?

The map has expanded from campus buildings to broadcasts and classrooms. The person on the other end still has somewhere they would like to be. Orie is working on what they can hear when they get there.