# Spence Green

> Spence Green is the co-founder and CEO of LILT AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI translation platform that has raised $95.5M across three funding rounds. A Stanford PhD in computer science and University of Virginia computer engineering graduate, Green built LILT in 2015 alongside co-founder John DeNero after both worked on Google Translate. His research career spans Northrop Grumman defense systems, Johns Hopkins NLP research, and Google, where he developed English-to-Arabic translation models. LILT now serves government agencies including the U.S. Air Force and global enterprises, combining adaptive machine translation with human oversight. Green's guiding philosophy - 'the world belongs to the discontented' - reflects his conviction that universal multilingual information access remains an unsolved problem.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at LILT AI
- **Organizations:** LILT AI, XSeed Capital, Google, Northrop Grumman, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BS, Computer Engineering (highest distinction), University of Virginia, MS, Computer Science (distinction in research), Stanford University, PhD, Computer Science (NLP & HCI, advisors Chris Manning and Jeff Heer), Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded LILT AI, raising $95.5M across Seed, Series A/B/C rounds, Led LILT to 78% next-word prediction accuracy in AI translation (up from 60% in 2020), Won Best Paper award from the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) for neural auto-review and correction system

## Career timeline

- **pre-2010** — Technical lead, project manager, and software engineer at Northrop Grumman, working on a national air defense system and avionics packages for naval aircraft
- **pre-2010** — Research intern at Johns Hopkins University
- **pre-2014** — Software and research intern at Google, working on Google Translate and developing English-to-Arabic translation models
- **pre-2014** — Fellow at XSeed Capital
- **2014** — Received PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University
- **2015** — Co-founded LILT AI in San Francisco with John DeNero
- **2015** — Became CEO of LILT AI
- **2020** — Raised $25M Series B funding for LILT
- **2020** — LILT awarded AFWERX SBIR Phase II contract with U.S. Air Force
- **2022** — Raised $55M Series C led by Four Rivers with Sequoia, Intel Capital, Redpoint, XSeed participating
- **2024** — Host of 'The Last Mile' podcast on AI and the future of global business communication

## Achievements

- Co-founded LILT AI, raising $95.5M across Seed, Series A/B/C rounds
- Led LILT to 78% next-word prediction accuracy in AI translation (up from 60% in 2020)
- Won Best Paper award from the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) for neural auto-review and correction system
- Secured AFWERX SBIR Phase II contract with the U.S. Air Force
- Partnered with In-Q-Tel to serve U.S. government intelligence agencies
- Scaled LILT to 540+ employees across San Francisco and Berlin offices
- Built 40+ enterprise integrations for content management and development systems
- Included in 2022 Gartner Market Guide for AI-Enabled Translation Services
- PhD research with Chris Manning and Jeff Heer at Stanford on mixed-initiative translation systems
- Developed shallow syntactic language model for English-to-Arabic translation at Google

## Latest updates

- **2024-01** — Hosting 'The Last Mile' podcast featuring conversations with business and technology leaders on AI and global enterprise communication
- **2022-04** — LILT closed $55M Series C round led by Four Rivers, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and XSeed Capital
- **2022-01** — LILT included in Gartner Market Guide for AI-Enabled Translation Services
- **2020-11** — LILT awarded AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contract with the U.S. Air Force

## Links

- Website: https://lilt.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/spencegreen
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvWS1fhPHtPZYWIT4li3COA

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/spence-green
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-11