DeepL acquires live event audio streaming and translation company Mixhalo

At conferences, speakers often deliver their keynotes or panel discussions in languages ​​that many attendees may not know. This results in users scrambling to get their phones and open translation apps to pick up audio from a distance, which isn’t always effective. mixhalo, Real-time audio playback solves such situationsjoins DeepL to enhance the German startup’s translation suite to help improve these types of translation experiences.

Mixhalo was founded in 2016 by Incubus guitarist and songwriter Mike Einziger, violinist Anne-Marie Simpson-Einziger, and Vic Singh, who now serves as the startup’s CEO.

The company’s initial goal was to improve the listening experience for concert attendees through its platform, but over the years it has evolved into a company that powers 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 many audio models coming to the market were useful for Mixhalo, as it could integrate a variety of them and compare performance. He said the rise of voice AI has not directly contributed to acquisition talks, but as modular companies grow significantly, they will “start encroaching” on the space Mixhalo operates in, making it difficult to win on pricing.

Mixhalo said it already relied on DeepL as its main translation provider, and it made sense to work closely with the company.

“The DeepL conversation was very organic,” Singh tells us. “Mixhalo has been 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 clearer the overlap became across the event space, API, and application layer, whether it’s meeting audio, document translation, or live event.”

DeepL has been a text translation player for a long time, but in the last few years, it has started generating buzz around its audio products. In 2024, the company launched The ability to translate from voice to text in more than 33 languages. It was launched in April this year Transliteration group To support use cases such as multilingual meetings. The Mixhalo acquisition could push DeepL into the live events space with the same combination.

“For us, Mixhalo will serve as a solution and also a marketing use case. The platform will allow us to demonstrate how DeepL technology works in real-time and in environments like conferences where people are on the ground,” DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told TechCrunch in a phone call.

With the acquisition of Mixhalo, which is based in San Francisco, DeepL is opening an office in the Bay Area to expand its U.S. operations, Kotilovsky said. Mixhalo competes with the likes Artificial Intelligence Wordly and Seven seven six palabra supported.