Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and founder at DeepL: Why DeepL wouldn’t settle for “good enough” AI.

0:00Jarek Kutylowski:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Thank you for following along. Today we've got a great conversation from our time at Slush and the conversation is supported by Databricks, whose unified platform power source on everyone's FY2026 target, becoming a truly AI-driven company, and Harmonic. Harmonic is the startup discovery engine used by leading VCs across the world to find their fund returners. Check them both out. Thank you. Hello, welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I'm here with Jarek, the CEO of DeepL. DeepL is one of the most amazing European companies that I have.

0:31Jarek Kutylowski:It's an amazing mission. You've done incredibly well. You've built and scaled what is now a phenomenal business across Europe. So thank you so much for joining me and taking the time. Thank you for being with you over here at Slash. Yeah, we love it. So can you touch a bit about the journey of DeepL? You've built this amazing product to break down the barriers between European languages and global languages. And I want to get into kind of where that vision, that mission came from. Yeah. I mean, like we started in 2017. which was basically the point in time when kind of deep learning, like the basics and the foundations for what we know as AI nowadays.

1:07Back then, nobody called it AI really. That was the moment when this has all been emerging. Maybe a little bit in the background, maybe a little bit in academia, maybe not everyone out there in the world has already been there. But we kind of really seen like this technology is going to be game changing for kind of anything language related. that we've seen like these models surpass anything that's out there on the market. And therefore, we also seen like this moment. OK, this is the point in time when you can break in. Like, yeah, there is there is big offerings from like big tech on this, but they're going to have to throw everything away that they had until now and go with this flow.

1:44And this is the opening when you as a startup can come in and create something amazing. Yeah. So, and then like out of this, like really this very typical, I think, PLG-ish kind of motion that we've seen like first a lot of self-serve, a lot of adoption of who you use it, and then kind of walking, doing our homework and walking our steps onto kind of more and more sophisticated use cases, more and more sophisticated customers, like up to enterprise basically.

2:14Jarek Kutylowski:Yeah, amazing. And, you know, was it a case of the technology is now available, so now let's build this thing? Or did you feel like, OK, the current providers are not good enough and maybe you felt passionate about this space. Maybe this was something that was close to your heart. What was it about, I don't know, translations and languages that made you think this is the right time. We've got the technology. I want to build this product. Yeah, I think I think it was about a bit of the availability of this technology. Like we've just seen this technology or like, oh, wow, like this is this is going to be pretty damn cool.

2:46And you can do something about that. Like, yeah, we knew the language problem. I think that is part of that. And maybe I'm just kind of underestimating that a little bit. I'm I'm more a technologist rather than a language person, I have to say. But still, like I speak three languages and like you're kind of sitting in Germany with like France across the border, Belgium across the border. Like, you know, the problem. But maybe I just underestimate the importance of that. But for me, it was mostly about the technology and, hey, we can do cool research that is going to actually have an impact from day one on people's lives.

3:20Jarek Kutylowski:Yeah, amazing. And, you know, I think DeepL's differentiator or kind of USP has been the quality of the translations, right? You know, insane quality that is globally recognized. We're seeing the rise and the improvement of all these other LLMs, these front-air models. How do you look at them? Do you see them as a threat? Do you think that they're never going to be able to specialize, contextualize well enough to compete? Or do you think, OK, we need to do more to make sure we kind of stay ahead? Yeah. I mean, like the availability of general purpose AI, basically, like everybody has AI at their fingertips somewhere, like whether it's built in your phone or in your search or like you have a chat GPT subscription, wherever, like there's AI everywhere.

4:03And companies are also embracing that, of course. So the kind of availability of kind of good translation, that is now the reality for everyone. Yes. But that's been kind of planned into our business model from the beginning on. Like we knew we're fighting against big platform players out there who, once again, they own your operating system. They own your phone. So we knew we can't compete there really. so we very very early decided also not only to focus on quality itself but also focus on the application of that quality in a business like in those areas where quality matters and where kind of each and every small piece of quality that you can can add on top of what is maybe available generally makes a difference of whether whether you're going to have to make one mistake in a whole contract that you've one correction in a whole contract or whether there's no corrections at all and just it just like it's it's it's perfect out of the box so kind of getting the define getting the defined these the nuances ready still makes makes makes huge difference and I think that's it's what I hear about

5:14Jarek Kutylowski:a lot of people who can maybe in like air applications yeah where it's the the context that they have acquired either in their previous jobs or the companies that they're building means that it's so hard for the model like the frontier models to actually do what they do because they don't have that context They don't understand the real use cases. I want to talk also about your product roadmap. How do you prioritize the applications of these technologies themselves versus going deeper and higher quality on the languages versus more and more languages? How do you think about what to build for who and when?

5:46Yeah, I mean, funny moment for you to ask because we've been always very focused and very concentrated on a smaller set of languages. And it was kind of the kind of common answer. DeepLaw is doing 30-something languages, but they're doing them great. Amazingly well, yeah. We have actually expended their offering to over 100. Yeah, I think it's basically last week, I think.

6:06Jarek Kutylowski:I thought it was like a beta or something, is it? No, that's live now for everyone in production. And this has been like a very, very much requested functionality by our customers. who, yes, like the huge part of their content that they need to translate is still in those 30 languages that we've been supporting for a while. But here and there, they do have also other languages, our other language requirements, and they want to have like just one single provider for all of it. So this is like a very clear reaction on this. Other than that, I mean, like, yeah, we are really focusing now much more on kind of enterprise customers and their needs.

6:53It is about kind of going deeper on the product side, but not on a product side, like only from an application layer, but also building the functionalities in the AI that's going to support this product. Interesting. That's going to allow, I don't know, like a customer to fully control their language so it's FDA compliant if you're a health care company in the US or something like this. So there's a lot of examples of how you can actually leverage having control of the technology and put that throughout the whole stack up into the product and into the application for particular customer use cases.

7:33But for that, you've got to really deeply understand what your customers are doing in language. And that's kind of always a big question because translation is so broad. You can use it for anything.

7:42Jarek Kutylowski:Yeah. And how do you stay close to your customers as enterprise clients? How do you make sure that you are building further nuances and the use cases of these very specific? Talk to them. Talk to them. And like talk to them really across the across the whole company. Like we have we have folks from our research teams who are sitting together with customers and trying to understand what they're doing. Like, of course, you can't do it for each and everyone, but you have to you have to do as much of this as possible or as reasonable in order to get near to them. Amazing. And when we talk about these clients that you work with, what's your go-to-market motion?

8:17Jarek Kutylowski:You mentioned product-like growth at the beginning. You're often working with these large and sometimes more traditional industries. How are you able to kind of get your foot in the door, get into the rooms, pitch them, sell them, and convince them of your products? Yeah, I think our approach has been kind of bottoms up. And like PLG, we've established this brand that DeepL is the specialist for anything language-related. And, I mean, okay, we can talk maybe a little bit about our new products, which are actually going outside of the language space. But for the sake of this question, people do know that DeepL is the go-to place to go.

8:56And in the past, that was basically it. I think right now we are then engaging in much deeper conversations. Like, we're just leveraging this. But then it's just like this kind of door opener to our customers. and then we can engage with them into conversations like, okay, what is your kind of highly critical translation needs, language needs that are most core to your business, what you're doing? If you're, for example, like a professional services company that is working across the whole Europe, you're going to have your specialist on a specific topic sitting in France, but you have your customer in Germany who needs this expertise.

9:40How do you bring them together? Do you hire new people or kind of grow them in Germany or do you just take your French experts and use deeper voice to kind of have live translation in all of the meetings that you have with your clients? Yeah, interesting. And that needs like a little bit more focus on the company itself and a lot of our go-to-market build out was actually into this direction. Love it. And, you know, you mentioned the new product.

10:05Jarek Kutylowski:I wanted to talk about the vision of DeepL down the line. Can you talk about the new product, what it means for the business and kind of, yeah, where it's come from? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you've asked me earlier, like, how DeepL has come to, like, how did we build it? And why did we build it? Like, for me, it was, like, all about the kind of excitement about AI and how that can change the kind of the way that we're working. I think translation was an amazing place to kind of start because this was like the first area where AI really made this difference that was not only like on paper, that was not only a proof of concept, it really kind of changed this industry.

10:45Yeah. And we kind of like while we're known for this language aspect and for translation, for us, it was all always about AI and making that applicable, making research applicable, making research work in products like in real life use cases. And out of this, at some point in time, we decided, okay, we want to go out also a little bit out of language. There's bigger fish to fry, actually. AI can do even more, and we're still incredibly excited about that. And we think with the DeepL agent, which is just, it is a pretty horizontal agent that can help organizations just to be more efficient in anything that is kind of administrative and anything that is kind of sitting maybe in finance, maybe in legal ops, maybe in people ops, like abstract away all of those workflows that are kind of still very manual nowadays.

11:47We've moved quite far along in terms of automation as a civilization, but not really that far away. Yeah, there's a long way to go. We still all do copy-paste all of the time. and kind of one of my mantras in this is like no copy pastes anymore. Like this needs to be gone. And we're kind of following a similar approach that we did for language in that where we kind of bottoms up, created a product which was simple to use and for everyone so that everyone has democratized access to translation and can do it on their own. And we are following in the same tracks with our agentic approaches Just give it to 10, 20, 50, 100, all of your employees and let them figure it out.

12:31Because people are actually pretty amazing at taking AI and building workflows with that. And we've seen such incredible ingenuity with our customers there.

12:40Jarek Kutylowski:Amazing. It sounds like an amazing product development to go alongside and adjacent to T-Pel. I want to talk about your experience. a European company born and bred amazing success across Europe in Germany Germany itself gets a lot of sticks sometimes for I don't know startup culture rightfully so I guess to some extent I want to get into what has been some of the best things about building from Europe and what have been some of the hardest things about building from Europe I think the good thing for us was the understanding of the product that we started with, translation it's just like if you're sitting in the Bay Area and the only language that you've ever learned is English, you don't get the problem space.

13:22And we always talk about the fact that you have to understand your customers, you have to understand your users, you have to understand your problem. And that's just hard if you're not building out of Europe for this particular case. Obviously, kind of access to talent. I think we haven't run into that much competition, especially at the beginning when we've been building the company, comparing maybe to where you would be if you were in one of the big centers and big hubs. So that's definitely good. And kind of also access to the markets. Like if you're building out of Europe, you are being recognized for being a European company.

14:00I do think that matters. I think that helps you in adoption in those markets. And there was a strong correlation between who our customers were, like once again, because of what the product is.

14:13Jarek Kutylowski:Yeah, of course. And where we've been sitting. So I think it all kind of fitted pretty well. Yeah, I think it's an amazing example of a European company that could only ever have been built in Europe because of, you know, a lot of the things that other people criticize, which is the lack of a monoculture, all of the languages, the different countries that we have. But it created the grounds for you to build the business that you've built. And only a European company could have done that in Europe. Yeah, which I think is an amazing example. But then at the same time, you've got to be also cautious.

14:41And I was like always very, very obsessed about the fact that we do not limit ourselves to Europe. We're sitting in Europe and we're maybe built out of Europe. And there's a lot of this kind of diversity and kind of European DNA in all of this. But if you're in tech, you have to target the global markets. There might be niches where you really want to go very, very specific onto Europe or even specific countries. But in general, look at the biggest companies that have built out of Europe. They've been built out of Europe, but at some point in time they said, we want to serve global markets, and that's incredibly important.

15:18And how early in your journey did you go? Super early. As soon as you could? Super early. I think for us, maybe different to other companies, Asia was the kind of market that we've expanded first. That's once again because of the product and the traction there. Anybody else would kind of start with the US, I guess. This is the typical one. For us, it was Asia first and the US next then. But yeah, pretty early because of this. Amazing.

15:45Jarek Kutylowski:And to finish up, I want to get two questions. You know, I want to talk about the best moment that you've had in your DeepL career. The moment where you thought, oh my God, this is going to work. Maybe a technological breakthrough, a commercial partnership, where you've realized, okay, this is going to happen. And then the worst moment, right? Something, a low point where you've been like up against the wall. How do we get through this? Yeah, I think honestly, like really the best moments come always from kind of new things that we can offer and us starting to see that these are coming through.

16:16And I do see a lot of that for the DeepL agent and kind of the early kind of things coming through. But it's still going to go back a little bit more for DeepL Voice. And I think the first meeting that I had with a Japanese customer where we had Deepal Voice running in the room, in the meeting, and how much of a real game changer there was for me. For once, I can really understand this customer. I know what they want and they can understand me. And it's like, oh, my God. That's amazing. The world has changed. The world has changed right now.

16:53Jarek Kutylowski:Yeah, I love founders whose best moment is always like a customer experience or a user experience moment. It says a lot about the founder and how product obsessed and customer obsessed you are. But I love that, you know, like seeing your user or your customer use the product and live the experience must be amazing. And then what about the hardest moment? Yeah, I think, honestly, I think there was a moment when in this whole kind of rise of AI and not really that much kind of competition coming up, but like uncertainty coming up. And like this market being just like so dynamic and there's so much noise coming up.

17:33And there's like basically there's a bubble that is forming around us. And like we're in the middle of it and we've been around for quite a while and haven't seen it. Yeah. And there was a moment when I kind of lost maybe my faith or where things have been hard for me personally. and I had to kind of sit down and like focus a little bit and close my eyes mentally maybe and kind of realign to what the world looks like right now and that was probably like one of the hardest kind of emotional moments for me to kind of go through but I think that's just like probably one of those typical like you're a founder, you're kind of growing with the company, you're growing with the market and you just got to absorb that and everybody kind of breaks at some point in time in that and you just have to figure out, are you able to get out of there or are you not able to get out of there?

18:34And how do you do that for yourself? How did you manage to kind of get through that? A lot of work with a coach, like an amazing coach that I had at this point in time, but also talking to my board, talking to my investors. They've been like amazing companions on this journey, like amazing people um getting uh like actually talking about those problems with them and doing a little bit of a therapy session with your board maybe like yeah amazing well like thank you

19:03Jarek Kutylowski:so much for joining me it's been absolutely amazing thank you for sharing the highs and the lows it's a pleasure thank you very much for having me