Max didn’t show up to a hackathon to start a company.
But he left with a fix for one of software’s biggest headaches: localization.
Now Lingo.dev helps thousands of developers make their apps multilingual in seconds.
This is the story of how Max Prilutskiy and Veronica Prilutskaya turned a weekend project into a startup changing how devs build around the world.
Meet Max. Max is a software engineer. Together with Veronica, he’d already built and sold a startup. But before all that, after years working across Europe, they kept seeing the same friction: localization slowed every team down.
Translating apps always meant endless tickets and spreadsheets.
Engineers shipped features, then waited weeks for translations.
Every label, every button, every change.
There had to be a better way.
At a New York hackathon in 2023, Max and Veronica built a small prototype to fix it. It auto-translated UI strings in CI/CD using LLMs. They won Best Dev Tool.
After that weekend, they decided to just keep building. Later, the prototype evolved into Lingo.dev.
Here’s how it works today.
Lingo.dev scans your React code, reads the Abstract Syntax Tree, and uses LLMs to translate text during the build.
When you hit save, your app reloads fully localized.
No refactor. No i18n boilerplate. It just works.
The magic is how old and new tech combine.
A deterministic AST pipeline paired with modern LLM inference.
Before LLMs, this approach made no sense.
Now it works beautifully, bringing instant translation right into the developer workflow.
Early users came fast.
Max and Veronica jumped in with dev teams, fixing localization pain one project at a time.
Word spread, customers followed.
Then YC, and a $4M seed round within the year.
Growth was messy.
As usage scaled, translation latency started to slow teams down.
Pull requests poured in from around the world, each one pushing the system to its limits. Still, Max and Veronica kept shipping, but they could only stretch themselves so far.
Then came Groq.
✅ Running Mistral on Groq made translations instant during hot reloads.
✅ What once took seconds now felt real time, allowing localization to finally match developer speed.
Today as Lingo.dev serves thousands of developers worldwide, Max and Veronica’s mission remains simple: help teams ship in every language faster than ever before.
Coming soon to an app near you.