The company recently raised $4.2 million in a seed funding round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and other investors. Lingo.dev aims to become an essential infrastructure layer for app localization, similar to how Stripe revolutionized online payments. Despite its small team of three employees, the founders plan to maintain a lean startup approach, drawing on their experience from their previous bootstrapped venture, Notionlytics. While Lingo.dev is still developing features like cultural symbol adaptation and metric conversions, it supports frameworks like MessageFormat for handling language-specific nuances.
Key takeaways:
- Lingo.dev is an AI-powered localization engine designed to help developers localize app front-ends seamlessly, functioning like a "Stripe" for app localization.
- The company, founded by Max Prilutskiy and Veronica Prilutskaya, recently raised $4.2 million in a seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and other investors.
- Lingo.dev uses a mix-and-match approach with multiple large language models (LLMs) to ensure the best model is chosen for each translation task, focusing on data privacy by not handling personal identifiable information (PII).
- The startup aims to eliminate friction in localization, making it a natural part of the tech stack, similar to how Stripe streamlined online payments.