At conferences, speakers often present their keynote or panel discussions in languages that many attendees may not know. This leads users to reach for their phones and open translation apps to record audio remotely, which isn’t always effective. Mixhalo, a real-time audio startup that solves situations like these, is joining DeepL to boost the German startup’s translation suite to help improve these kinds of translation experiences.
Mixhalo was founded in 2016 by Incubus guitarist and songwriter Mike Einziger, violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger, and Vik Singh, who is now the startup’s CEO.
The company’s initial step was to improve the listening experience for concertgoers through its platform, but over the years it has evolved into a company that provides real-time audio for sports and live events. The startup has raised over $39 million in capital from investors including Fortress Investment, Founders Fund, Defy Partners and Cowboy Ventures.
Mixhalo CEO Singh said in an email that the tones of voice models coming to market were beneficial for Mixhalo as it could integrate a variety of them and compare performance. He said the rise of voice AI did not directly contribute to the acquisition talks, but as the modeling companies grew, they would “start encroaching” on the space Mixhalo operates in, making it difficult to win on pricing.
Mixhalo said it already relied on DeepL as its primary translation provider and it made sense to work more closely with the company.
Singh tells us, “The DeepL conversation was very organic. Mixhalo was a long-time DeepL customer, and I attended a customer dinner and ended up sitting next to Sebastian, DeepL’s CTO. We just started talking, and the more we talked, the more obvious the overlap became in the event space, in the API, whether it was at the document level, or at the voice meeting level, or at the voice meeting level.
DeepL has been a text translation player for a long time, but in recent years, it has started making noise for its voice products. In 2024, the company introduced voice-to-text translation capabilities in more than 33 languages. This April, it launched a voice-to-voice translation suite to support use cases like multilingual meetings. Acquiring Mixhalo may push DeepL into the live events space with the same suite.
“For us, Mixhalo will act as a solution and a marketing use case. The platform will allow us to demonstrate how DeepL’s technology works in real-time and in environments such as conferences where people are present on the ground,” DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told TechCrunch.
Kutylowski said that with the acquisition of Mixhalo, which is based in San Francisco, DeepL is opening an office in the Bay Area to expand its US operations. Mixhalo competes with its peers Wordly AI and Seven Seven Six-backed Palabra.
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