At conferences, speakers often give keynote addresses and panel discussions in languages unknown to many attendees. This leaves users scrambling to pick up their phones, open translation apps and capture audio from a distance, which isn’t always effective. Mixhalo, a real-time audio startup that solves these situations, joins DeepL to power the German startup’s translation suite and help improve this type of translation experience.
Mixhalo was founded in 2016 by Incubus guitarist and songwriter Mike Einziger, violinist Anne-Marie Simpson-Einziger, and Vic Singh, now the startup’s CEO.
The company’s initial pitch was to improve the listening experience for concert attendees through its platform, but over the years it has evolved into a real-time audio company for sports and live events. The startup has raised more than $39 million in funding from investors including Fortress Investment, Founders Fund, Defy Partners, and Cowboy Ventures.
Singh, Mixhalo’s CEO, said in an email that the large number of voice models coming to market will be beneficial to Mixhalo as it will be able to integrate different voice models and compare performance. He said the rise of voice AI did not directly contribute to acquisition negotiations, but as the model company grows, it will “start to encroach” on the territory in which Mixhalo operates, making it harder to win on pricing.
Mixhalo said it already relies on DeepL as its primary translation provider and it made sense to work closely with the company.
“The DeepL conversation was very organic. Mixhalo is 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, but the more we talked, the more it became clear that there was overlap across the event space, APIs, and application layers, including conference audio, document translation, and live events.”
DeepL has been a text translation player for a long time, but in the last few years they started making noise about their audio products. In 2024, the company launched voice-to-text translation capabilities in more than 33 languages. In April of this year, the company launched a speech-to-speech translation suite that supports use cases such as multilingual conferencing. With the acquisition of Mixhalo, DeepL could expand into the live events space with the same suite.
“For us, Mixhalo serves not only as a solution, but also as a marketing use case. This platform allows us to show how DeepL’s technology works in real time and in an environment like a conference where people are on-site,” DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told TechCrunch by phone.
Kutylowski said that with the acquisition of San Francisco-based Mixhalo, DeepL will open an office in the Bay Area to expand its U.S. operations. Mixhalo competes with the likes of Wordly AI and Seven Seven Six-backed Palabra.
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