language-access
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Ad Astra makes understanding an operation
A Spanish ballot. A signed conversation. A verified interpreter session. Ad Astra puts the practical machinery behind language access in one place.
The Most Important Person in the Room May Be the One You Almost Forgot to Call
Communication Access Partners built a business around a problem most institutions notice only when it becomes urgent: the people in the room cannot understand one another. Three decades, six service lines, and a run of acquisitions later, the small North Carolina firm has become an instructive case in the logistics of being understood.
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.
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.
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.
Cathleen Kuo Is Teaching Machines to Listen Before Hospitals Speak
A Taiwan-born physician with more than 200 research publications left the expected path to build Opalite Health. Her wager is simple: in a room full of medical technology, the most important tool may be the one that helps two people understand each other.
Lango
Lango is a technology-enabled language services company that unifies interpretation, translation, and language access into a single secure platform. Founded in 2016 and launched from Buenos Aires with $15K and a laptop, Lango connects organizations in healthcare, legal, education, and government to on-site, phone, video, and AI-driven interpreting and translation across 200+ languages, including American Sign Language. It serves more than 1,000 customers through its platform and a family of affiliated language companies.
Josh Daneshforooz
Josh Daneshforooz is the co-founder and CEO of Lango, an Austin-based, AI-enabled language services company that has scaled by acquiring seven businesses across the United States. Raised by an Iranian Muslim father and an American Christian mother, he trained as a theologian at Harvard, served as a Harvard Leadership Fellow, and pivoted from interfaith peacemaking and leadership consulting to building software that knits interpretation, translation and human expertise into a single workflow for over 1,000 customers.
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.