#288 The Language AI Startups to Watch in 2026

0:00Florian:Language has really packaged inside solutions designed about much broader business objectives.

0:10Florian:All right, we're here with the definitely hottest episode of Slated Pod so far in the 288 podcast we've recorded. Hi Esther. Hello. How are you holding up? Good. Yes, it's balmy, humid and hot. Humid and hot. We're in Europe and the heat is on. So for those of you who don't live in Europe, it's like 37 degrees Celsius here in Zurich, which is insane. So that's like nearly 100 Fahrenheit. I guess in London, it's marginally cooler. Maybe two degrees. Yeah. Okay. And we're talking about it not because we like to talk about the weather, because we're recording this podcast in a place where there's no air con.

0:46Florian:Because as we learn now, there's basically no air con in the countries that we inhabit. And yeah, that makes it challenging. But we're still here and we're still recording a podcast for you. Probably things are a little bit cooler in San Francisco where we are going in the early, in the first week of September. So Wednesday, September 2nd and September 3rd, we're going to be in San Francisco at the phenomenal St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. So we're super happy to have confirmed a couple of outstanding panelists for the investment panel that you're going to run, Esther, from Kosla Ventures, one of the world's leading VC firms.

1:27Florian:Kanu Gulati is going to join us there. And Radhika Malik is going to join us. She's a partner at Dell Technology Capital. And so, yeah, we're very much looking forward to that. Two great additions to the speaker roster there. We also have Georg L from Phrase. We have Marco Trombetti from Translated, Gabriel Fairman from Works. Then Teresa Marshall from Salesforce, Eliza Dublava from Coca-Cola, Emily Xue from ScaleAI and of course, Marlon Duarte who's heading hospitality and language services at UCLA Health. And those are just some of the many panelists and speakers that you can expect. It's going to be a great show.

2:08Florian:Looking forward to it. You know, it's not going to be a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, I guess, near the sea. So, yeah, it's going to be great. Well, there'll be a breeze at the very least. There will be a breeze. Please, please let there be a breeze. I need a breeze. Yeah, I have two fans running at the office and yeah, that makes it marginally livable. Cool. So today we want to talk to you about a few things. First, we want to talk to you about the 50 under 50, our annual kind of startup monitor that we are putting out. I want to talk a bit about at the other end of the spectrum, what some of the big technology companies launched recently.

2:51Florian:Just very, very briefly, there's always this flood of announcements that new language AI features are coming out. You're going to walk us through a couple of M &As and funding stories. Then there's some RFPs going on and hiring going on in public sector land. And yeah, that's it for today. We want to keep it quite short because, yeah, as I said before, I think brains are probably at, I don't know, for me, it's maybe 70 % today. so i don't want to bother you guys with with half takes literal hot takes actual hot takes you're right all right uh so the good thing is that for the language you have 50 under 50 we're not relying on hot takes but on on coolly uh coolly elaborated research by our research team so again what is it it's basically a collection of startups that are younger than 50 months and we again found a cohort of 50 companies in the language AI space.

3:48Florian:So very, very happy about this. Can you remind me of the categories? I think we have one, two, three, hang on, seven categories? Yeah. We do, yeah. I mean, and they change, they shift the categories over the years. So they're not static categories as you might expect. Obviously, I think this is the third, fourth edition of the Slater Language AI 50 Under 50 that we've done now. and yeah it's very much based on on the companies included and then looking at what kind of categories they they naturally form so we have translation and localization we have multilingual media as a category we have live communication as a category transcription and captions then voice ai and ai sign and data and evaluation those are the seven categories on this year's language AI 50 under 50.

4:43Florian:Seven categories, seven takeaways. So let's go through the high-level takeaways here and explore them in a little more detail. So first, one of the takeaways is that language AI startups are solving full buyer problems, not language tasks. And we're going to elaborate that in a second. The second take that our research team found was agenting and orchestration. Native startups are arriving now from day one. More specialized AI first LSIs are beginning to emerge slowly. Then what you mentioned before, AI sign. So AI sign language is becoming a genuine startup category. It used to be super, super niche, which is the handful of companies.

5:20Florian:And now it's a genuine category. The learning loop, the data learning loop is increasingly becoming the moat. There is still room for niche specialists, which is what's needed on top of these super powerful general models. And then capability still matters, especially in voice. And we're going to talk about this in a second. So let's go to the first takeaway here. Language AI startups are solving full buyer problems, not language tasks necessarily, right? So in the early Language AI wave, this was focused on like translating text, converting text into speech, producing dubbed speech. But in this year's cohort, our research team found that Language AI is really packaged inside solutions designed about much broader business objectives, right?

6:08Florian:So let me give you three examples. So the first one is a company called Suno AI, Suno with an H at the end. So they offer a clinical workflow platform built on AI transcription, so speech-to-text. So it's generating medical documentation, assists with order entry, electronic health records, etc. So Suno AI. Another one is Verbalate, LTP called Verbalate. They're not really, I mean, you'd think they're selling AI dubbing, but what they're positioning themselves is selling global reach, right? So they help you and educators and creators transform a video into multilingual content. They basically give you the kind of all-in solution that you can make sure that your views go up.

6:52Florian:And then MixHalo, I think that's how you probably pronounce it, right? MixHalo is... MixHalo or Mix-a-lo, I don't know. It's probably MixHalo. MixHalo. MixHalo. So they have low latency audio delivery, real-time translation captions, AI generated summaries, et cetera. And it's basically saying they're a communication platform. And D-Bell actually acquired them, maybe aqua hired them, acquired them in June, 2026. So, well, I guess that's this one. Yeah, they just announced like a week or so. They announced. And I think they're based in San Francisco. So MixHalo, if you're listening, you know where to go in September.

7:30Florian:Cool. Don't want to spend too much time in the agentic orchestration in native startups, complex one, go to the 5050 page and read about it. One thing that I do want to highlight there is a company called Hyperlocalize, which was apparently founded by the creator of Canvas Magic Translate. So somebody from Canva said, hey, I'm going to do this. I'm going to start my own company and started Hyperlocalize with an S. And they focus on automating the work surrounding translation, context retrieval, brand consistency, UI constraints, review decisions. So anything around probably the design element, right?

8:09Florian:More specialized AI first LSI. So there's a company called, are beginning to emerge. So these firms combine AI native delivery with expert oversight. So the classic LSI, right? So there's a company called Global3. They reflect that trend in media. It was founded not by somebody from Canva, but somebody from Deluxe Media. So check out Global3. Still a lot of credibility. Still a lot of credibility in that space. And then one of the takes, number four, we had AI sign languages becoming a genuine category. And there we had a company called Rilo with a Y. They raised$85 million in funding recently for that type of tech.

8:53Florian:And, you know, unlike many languageized startups that build on top of foundation models, I think in sign language, companies often develop bespoke models from the ground up. At least that's what our research team found. Did you know some of these companies? I mean, I didn't have RIL on my radar. Not many, to be honest. Yeah. What were the others called? The others are called Coda Sign. Sorry, Elephant Talk and Talk Sign. Talk Sign I think I'd heard of, yeah. Cool. All right, guys, welcome to the 50 under 50. And then another one is more on the data. It's the learning loop is becoming the moat.

9:32Florian:So basically the learning loop is becoming a form of proprietary IP built not on public benchmarks, but on an organization's own data decisions and expertise. There we have companies like Lenico. That's an AI translation platform that learns from consumer corrections, terminology, domain specific language. Then a company called Ownvia, they turn corporate terminology, style guides, linguistic requirements into reusable AI workflows and agents. I like that. Cool. And another one is there's still room for niche specialists. So let's go through the room, the niche specialists. First one is Lipdup.

10:18Florian:So single technical challenge. They focus lip synchronization. That's pretty niche and probably not solved yet. I'm sure for kind of frontal, like, yeah, kind of YouTube videos with like people like us, like basically on a podcast, but there's many more complex scenarios. Been like in the works for so long. I remember researching into it sort of five plus years ago, the whole like lip syncing and Google doing a lot in that, I think at the time. We had lots of the, blanket on the name, but we met some people last year in San Francisco, there's some companies in this space, but yeah, it's complex.

10:57Florian:All right, let's go to the last one. Capability still matters, especially in voice. That was our take. So, capability, speech and voice is perhaps the clearest example for that trend because unlike in text translation where high quality multilingual capability is increasingly available through foundation models and speech systems. It remains sensitive, our research team says to latency, personalization, multilingual alignment, voice quality, real-time performance. So you have specialized model developers there that really continue to pop up. So we had in this year's cohort, Cartesia and then our friends from Newphonic, who we met in London a few months ago, and then Gradium, who joined our panel in London and a company called Hamza is also on our list or Maya Research, NC Speech and Shunia Labs and Shunia Labs focuses on, they focus on speech models and infrastructure for multilingual and regional markets.

12:03Florian:So there you have it, seven takeaways from seven categories from our 50 under 50 list. It's for free. You don't need to pay for it. You can go there, you can look at it, you can filter, you can enjoy it. And yeah, thanks to all the companies that participated and hope to meet many of you, hopefully have some of you on the podcast. Yeah, great stuff. So do we want to talk about, what is it? I think we had it on our agenda, but like, so the Google expanding, the AI live speech translation again. Okay, we've talked about it so many times. I think this is following on the news that OpenAI launched that real-time GPT Translate and Zoom launched like a translator and a summarizer.

12:51Now Google is launching AI live speech translation through Gemini 3.5 live

12:58Florian:translate, so tweaking the model. I think these big companies are taking any opportunity to do another launch, right? So you go from 3.0 to 3.5, you do another big launch and people like us talk about it. Yeah, I mean, I suppose it's kind of keeping regular attention and focus on them, isn't it? As opposed to the competition or as well as the competition. And I mean, just to point you did that article, we also followed the worldwide developer conference, Apple's worldwide developer conference, 2026. And we combined or kind of, yeah, well, we compiled all of the, you know, language AI, translation, localization language access capabilities that they, they announced.

13:42Florian:So there's some stuff for developers in there. And I think we said that Apple demonstrated more advanced agentic localization workflow. Apparently there's something called an, they, they showcase an example where Xcode translated an app into, into Filipino configured localization resources, updated strings and brand translation and accessibility tasks in parallel. So yeah, agentic, automated. Finally, we unpacked the mythos. How would you pronounce that? Mythos. I'm having trouble reading this. It's one of those words that like, I look at it and it's the same in German and I just can't make. Mythos.

14:29Florian:right and so i'm reading as mythos but it's mythos all right so there's this whole story around like anthropic launching this you know model they've been warning about for like half a year to kind of you know do the fear pr and then they launched it and then the u.s government told them to pull it again for you know whatever reason there's probably a million other podcasts that explain that to you but what we did we went to the so-called system card and looked at the the language capabilities of this amazing, too dangerous to release or too dangerous to keep online rather a model. And yeah, there's some fairly interesting takes there.

15:11Florian:So, you know, the system card did include some notable language related findings. They benchmarked it in 44 languages. It performed really strongly across a number of like very geeky kind of evaluation benchmarks that if you're interested in, go to the website and look at it. And yeah, I think we pulled out one quote by, who's that from? Did you pull that into the notes there? There was a comment by RWS, head of innovation of TrainAI by RWS, publishing on a post on LinkedIn, just talking about, I suppose, the release. and he, Tomas, characterized it as more of a catch-up than a breakthrough in multilingual AI.

15:58So he said that Fable 5, it does reach parity with leading frontier models, but it's not kind of obviously or clearly surpassing them.

16:07Florian:And I don't understand. What's the Mythos 5, Fable 5? All right, again, there's other podcasts. So Big Model, Anthropic, Fear PR for half a year, now a major story about the US government pulling it. And if you rely on the expertise of the head of innovation at TrainAI from RWS, it's reaching, it's basically catching up, not exceeding, at least in the language component there. All right. Do we want to talk about investments? A couple. Yeah, we definitely should. I mean, some of it will be familiar from what actually what we've covered either in the 50 under 50 or, well, in particular. so I mean you mentioned I think Rilo we covered on the one hand it went into our 50 under 50 but as you also mentioned it raised the company raised 85 million recently so we had coverage of that on Slater so they've got 85 million to build AI language solutions for the deaf population yeah a lot of money and as we said in our analysis this is becoming sort of a very credible category now or a bona fide category.

17:20Then we also covered Dell Technologies Capital. Yeah, there you are. Yeah, exactly. Dell Technologies Capital led an investment into Bland, 50 million US dollars into Bland, which is a full stack voice AI startup. As we mentioned, Dell Technologies Capital will be on our investor panel at SlateCon San Francisco in just a few months. So, yeah, hopefully you'll get a chance to kind of unpack a little bit about that live on stage with them. But what can I say about Bland? The based in San Francisco. Great. Why don't they come along as well? The startup builds voice AI agents for complex enterprise phone conversations.

18:06This I mean, I've seen this multiple times, numerous times when we're talking about sort of areas or startup areas that are getting investment currently. um they're sort of well from what i can see i mean their shtick seems to be taking or handling longer more complex phone calls than maybe many of their peers so they say that their conversations that they're handling often last um between 30 and 45 minutes so obviously that's a long time to be

18:34Florian:for the voice ai agents even the eye gets tired yeah i guess tired yeah it needs to think for a bit longer. And then, well, smaller scale in terms of the investment, we had a news story that Gridly, which specializes in kind of gaming and content management, raised 1.5 million for their content management platform, with the idea being they're going to be using that to build agentic AI into the platform. So again, they've got this specific, well, they have a clear niche, which is the gaming localization. But I think they say that they're also likely to start targeting other sectors or kind of bringing the technology to other sectors such as FinTech, EdTech, and B2B, SaaS.

19:24And I think you spoke to their CEO, actually.

19:26Florian:And Elvinson on the podcast. About a year ago. Yeah, about a year ago, a bit more than a year ago. Yeah. Yeah. So those were sort of the three funding stories I wanted to highlight. Yeah, so we do have a couple of M &A stories to bring to you as well. I think both happening within Europe, these two since we last spoke. So first up is Poweling, which announced it's acquired Atlantique Traduction, which is a France-based LSI that's been operating for more than 45 years. and they have experience in defense, naval, industrial and technical sectors. It seems to be fairly boutique. They had, when we looked, something like nine people on LinkedIn, Atlantic Translation.

20:10There you go. I localized the company name when I shouldn't have done.

20:14Florian:Atlantic Translation. There you go. So that was an acquisition by them. I think it's probably the first acquisition that they've completed since they acquired EDEM in California back in, well, last year that was, which we represented in its sale. And the second piece of news was that Digital Talk in Sweden has acquired Hieronymus in Switzerland, Zurich-based legal translation firm, which was also represented by Slater. There you go. It's been a good time. Again, so this is Digital Talk second acquisition after buying 24 Translate in July 2025, also reped by Slater and yeah, legal specialist, now part of Digital Talk.

21:08Florian:Building a Switzerland presence. All right. So you have a few more weeks to register at the early bird for SlaterCon San Francisco. You know, maybe like three or four weeks. So catch that early bird while it's still there. Again, amazing agenda in the buildup. And we'll leave it at a cool 20 minutes here to make sure that we survive the heat wave. And our devices. Yeah, the camera here on the iPhone is running hot. Cool. All right. Thanks for listening and we'll be back in a week or so.