live-captioning
(3)
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.
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.
Tim Jung
Tim Jung is the Founder and CEO of XL8.ai, a San Jose-based AI company building the world's most accurate machine translation engine for media and entertainment. A Columbia University PhD and former Google tech lead, Jung left a career launching NLP search features to solve a problem he saw up close: the media industry's broken localization pipeline. XL8 has since translated 800,000+ hours of content across 45+ languages, raised $11.5M including a $7.5M Series A led by KB Investment, and built a platform where AI doesn't replace human translators but makes them dramatically faster.