ai-translation
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MultiLingual Technologies Wants AI to Translate. Humans Still Get the Last Word.
The California language company is turning translation, interpreting and training into a connected set of services and software. Its bet: speed is easier to sell when someone remains responsible for the words.
XTM Wants to Turn Translation’s Messy Middle Into Software
The 24-year-old localization company has grown from a cloud translation manager into a six-product platform. Its wager is that enterprises need orchestration and governance more than another translate button.
Matt Singer Keeps Choosing the Hard Categories
From HR software to city hall to multilingual AI, the San Diego marketer has made a career of turning complicated software into a reason to care.
Dave Deasy Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Technology Easier to Choose
From e-commerce and online privacy to cybersecurity and live AI translation, Dave Deasy has built a career around one stubborn marketing problem: making sophisticated technology useful, legible, and worth adopting.
Language IO Wants One Support Team to Speak 150 Languages - Without Hiring 150 Teams
The Wyoming software company is betting that multilingual customer service should be infrastructure, not a staffing puzzle. Its proof is hiding in the help desk: fewer language silos, faster replies and, for some customers, sharply lower costs.
Lina Tonk Is Teaching Marketing to Speak Revenue - and Every Language
The Colombian-born CMO built her career by translating between rooms that often misunderstand one another - marketing and sales, brand and revenue, headquarters and the customer. At Smartling, language itself has become the business.
Smartling’s New Job Is Not Translation - It’s Making AI Safe for the World’s Biggest Brands
Generic AI made a translated sentence cheap. Smartling is betting that enterprises will still pay to make millions of those sentences accurate, on-brand, measurable and ready to publish.
Lakshman Rathnam Turned One Silent Conference Into a Billion-Minute Translation Business
At a conference in Japan, a veteran hardware engineer discovered what exclusion sounds like. His answer was Wordly - software designed to let every listener choose the language of the room.
Gunwoo Kim Is Teaching AI to Hear Between the Words
Before Cuckoo could translate a technical meeting in real time, its co-founder had to learn a subtler language: how engineers, customers and old friends decide what matters.
Cuckoo
Cuckoo is a real-time AI interpreter built for global business conversations. Companies invite Cuckoo into Zoom calls or in-person meetings, and it delivers live translation across 20+ languages while learning each team's internal documents, glossaries, and jargon so technical sales, support, and marketing conversations don't lose meaning between languages. Founded in 2024 by KAIST alumni Yong Hee Lee and Gunwoo Kim, the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $1.8M seed round in 2025.
KUDO
KUDO is a New York-based language technology company that delivers real-time speech translation and interpretation for online, in-person, and hybrid meetings and events. It pairs a global network of roughly 12,000 professional human interpreters with its own patented AI speech-to-speech translation engine, letting people speak and be understood across more than 200 spoken and sign languages on platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex.
Smartcat
Smartcat is an AI-powered global content platform that lets enterprises create, translate, and localize content in 280+ languages. It combines a translation management system, computer-assisted translation editor, and a matching engine that routes work to the best AI models, with an integrated marketplace of 500,000+ professional linguists for human review. More than 1,000 companies - including roughly 20% of the Fortune 500 - use Smartcat to scale multilingual content while cutting cost and turnaround time.
Fardad Zabetian
Fardad Zabetian is the founder and CEO of KUDO, a New York-based platform that puts live human interpretation and AI translation inside video meetings in more than 200 languages. An engineer by training, he spent two decades building the physical hardware of multilingual conferencing - including a role in the 2012 redesign of the United Nations General Assembly Hall - before turning that expertise into a cloud platform. He has founded five companies, invested in more than 20 startups, and built his career around a single idea: that language should not be the border between people.
Langfinity
Langfinity (formerly Byrdhouse) is a San Francisco AI company building a real-time voice and text translation platform for global teams. Founded by ex-interpreters Snow Huo and Jacob Greenway, it delivers industry-specific live interpretation across 100+ languages, plugging into video calls and Microsoft Teams so multilingual meetings, sales calls, safety briefings, and training sessions can happen without swapping tools or hiring a human interpreter.
XL8.ai
XL8.ai is a Silicon Valley AI company building machine translation purpose-built for media and live events. Founded in 2019 by ex-Google and ex-Apple engineers, it turns video, audio and live speech into accurate subtitles, synthesized dubbing and real-time interpretation across 45+ languages. Its two flagship products - MediaCAT for localization workflows and EventCAT for live multilingual events - are used by language service providers, broadcasters, FAST channels and enterprises in 70+ countries, with the company reporting more than 800,000 hours of content and 2.2+ billion words translated.
Snow Huo
Snow Huo is the co-founder and CEO of Langfinity (formerly Byrdhouse), a San Francisco AI company building real-time voice and video translation across 100+ languages for global teams. A former remote Chinese interpreter and product leader at Groupon, Chowbus, and Disney, she moved to the US at 17 and was teased for not speaking English - an experience that became the founding seed for a tool that lets people understand each other instantly, no matter the language they speak.
Wordly
Wordly is a San Francisco Bay Area company that delivers cloud-based, AI-powered live translation, captioning, transcription and summaries for meetings and events. Without apps, headsets or human interpreters, attendees scan a QR code and follow along in their own language across 60+ languages and 3,000+ language pairs. Founded in 2017 by Lakshman Rathnam, Wordly serves 4,000+ customers and has supported over 5 million users worldwide, and was ranked among the fastest-growing software companies on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list.
LILT
LILT is an enterprise AI platform for multilingual content, built around adaptive machine translation and human-in-the-loop workflows. Founded by former Google Translate researchers Spence Green and John DeNero, it serves global enterprises and government agencies who need translation that learns from feedback rather than starting from scratch every time.
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.