In today’s global economy, reaching international customers quickly can mean the difference between capturing or missing massive market opportunities. Yet most companies still piece together a complex workflow of spreadsheets, translation agencies, and precious developer time to localize their products—often taking weeks to translate even simple updates. This outdated process means millions of potential customers can’t access products in their native language, creating an artificial barrier to global growth.

When I first met Max Prilutskiy and Veronica Prilutskaya, the founders of Lingo.dev (formerly Replexica), their vision immediately resonated: What if every software company could be born global, where reaching customers in Tokyo or São Paulo was as natural as serving those in San Francisco or London? Their approach to solving this challenge stood out for its deep understanding of both the technical and human elements of the problem.

We’ve seen how the emergence of large language models has created an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine localization. While traditional approaches rely heavily on human translators and manual processes, Lingo.dev’s AI Localization Engine leverages these advances to analyze UI placement, user flows, and brand voice, generating high-quality translations automatically. 

More importantly, they’ve made the integration process incredibly simple—requiring just one line of code to transform any application into a multilingual product. Just as Stripe revolutionized payments by making them invisible to developers, Lingo.dev is transforming localization into a seamless part of the development workflow.

What sets Lingo.dev apart is their obsession with the details – and software localization has hundreds of them. While most tools just swap words, Lingo preserves critical context, handles idiomatic expressions, and works seamlessly across JSON, YAML, and mobile formats. The system runs right in your CI/CD pipeline, so teams like Cal.com and Mistral can simply push their code and Lingo automatically updates translations across tens of languages. This prevents broken layouts, missing plurals or out-of-sync strings.

The founders bring exactly the right background to tackle this challenge. Max started in linguistics before discovering programming, later becoming an engineering leader at Typeform where he experienced localization bottlenecks firsthand. Veronica, with her background in AI and data science, previously architected AI systems that processed customer data at scale. Together, they’ve already built and sold a successful B2B SaaS company used by Shopify. 

What excites me most about collaborating with Max and Veronica is their unique combination of technical depth and customer empathy. They’re not just building translation tools—they’re creating infrastructure that makes every software product inherently global.