Having been put to the test during the 2025 US football championship game (Super Bowl LIX), where it provided near-instantaneous speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) of sports commentary into several languages, 18-month old startup Lingopal.ai announced on February 12, 2025 that it had secured USD 14M in Series A funding.
Led by DCM, with participation from Scrum Ventures, Marquee Ventures, and a number of angel investors, the funds should give the relatively unknown Lingopal.ai a push to rapid expansion. In fact, CEO and co-founder Deven Orie, told sports news site Sportico that the company has already secured broadcast translation contracts with at least one of the major four North American sports leagues.
The press release states that Lingopal.ai is partnering with customers in the lucrative sports industry, valued at USD 56bn and said to struggle to connect with international audiences due to the expense and logistical challenges of human translation.
The start-up is also betting on a stat taken from a January 2025 article in the Sports Business Journal that puts sports events as 87 of the top 100 most viewed in 2024.
The press release also says that live sports events is an area hampered by the limitations and high cost of traditional translation, and that “the lack of a simple, plug-and-play solution for broadcasting in multiple languages has left a void in the market.”
Founded in 2023 by Orie and Casey Schneider, the co-founders have drawn on their background in Cloud/AI at Microsoft and Tesla respectively to develop an AI translation platform that can handle live audio streams into over 120 languages.
Lingopal.ai claims to have created models that effectively “can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud with no integration, purely plug-and-play.”
The company’s speech-to-speech engine leverages six foundational AI models developed in-house. The AI speech translation technology is said to also preserve the emotional nuance and contextual understanding, including slang, idioms, and industry-specific jargon, of the original speaker, with less than two seconds of latency on its smallest models.
Hurst Lin, General Partner at DCM, said that “Lingopal.ai’s impressive technology, coupled with its rapid growth and exceptional team, made this a compelling investment for DCM … We look forward to partnering with Deven and the team as they grow.”
With this recent funding, Lingopal.ai plans to invest in research and development to further enhance its product, refine its real-time infrastructure, and expand into new markets.
The startup says it experienced rapid growth and claims it doubled its workforce between November 2024 and January 2025. It also projects doubling it again as soon as April 2025.