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.