Y Combinator, the accelerator known for helping some of the most innovative startups get off the ground, has recently backed a newcomer to the localization world. Lingo.dev raised USD 4.2m in a December 2024 seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and a number of angels.

A February 18, 2025, TechCrunch write-up of the seed round described Lingo.dev as an “AI-powered localization engine that serves the infrastructure to help developers go global — a ‘Stripe’ for app localization, if you will.”

While Co-Founder and CEO Max Prilutskiy declined to share financial metrics, the company is already working with clients such as open-source scheduling platform Cal.com, Captions AI, and French unicorn Mistral AI. He said that in his experience, “both small startups and large enterprises face the same localization challenges.”

Lingo.dev, founded in Barcelona in December 2023 as Replexica, offers a localization engine that helps software companies go international much more quickly than traditional processes by working “under the hood.”

“What drives us is seeing how universally hated the current process is,” Prilutskiy told Slator, noting that the inspiration for Lingo.dev came from his own experience watching engineering waste time, and marketing teams miss opportunities, due to “painful” localization workflows. 

Lingo.dev’s tools can currently localize software products across 83 languages, requiring engineer involvement “only when strictly necessary.” 

“What drives us is seeing how universally hated the current process is,” — Max Prilutskiy, Co-Founder and CEO, Lingo.dev

Prilutskiy explained that, while the advent of large learning models (LLMs) made Lingo.dev’s approach possible, the company goes beyond using AI for translation, instead building systems that coordinate across multiple specialized models to understand software context. 

“Our breakthrough was creating an AI Localization Engine that treats code as a complex data structure, not just text,” Prilutskiy said. “It analyzes UI placement, infers the purpose of elements, and understands how text fits into the broader product experience.”

Engineers connect their codebase, specify target languages, and set brand voice preferences; then, they continue coding as usual. The Lingo.dev engine analyzes new text as it enters the code and translates the text based on context. 

Automated pull requests allow engineers to quickly approve and integrate new translations, which then go live with the next deployment. Each step happens in Git, Prilutskiy said, so “it fits perfectly into modern development workflows.”

Starting Small, Dreaming Big

The first prototype for Lingo.dev was developed as part of a Cornell University hackathon, which led to the company’s first paying customers. Lingo.dev then participated in Y Combinator’s fall 2024 program, rebranded in December 2024, and moved to San Francisco. 

In addition to Prilutskiy, the team currently consists of a founding engineer and Veronica Prilutskaya, co-founder and CPO, who has a background in AI, ML, and data science. Prilutskiy, who specializes in software engineering, continues to demo the product for potential clients as needed. The company will use funding from this seed round to expand, while remaining intentionally lean.

Beyond hiring, Lingo.dev has plans to deepen its applied AI research and build new capabilities based on requests from software and localization engineers. 

Areas slated for further work include enhanced context understanding using UI screenshots; expanded integrations with the modern development stack; and more sophisticated brand voice controls. Lingo.dev is also exploring complex linguistic challenges, such as gender-specific language. 

“The big vision remains the same: building localization infrastructure for the internet,” Prilutskiy said. “We want to eliminate localization as a barrier to global reach, so companies can focus on building great products while reaching users in any language.”