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.
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.