“A grounded visionary”. DeepL founder Jaroslaw Kutylowski

With DeepL, you’re never lost for words, even if you don’t speak the language. Since it was launched in 2016, the Cologne-based start-up has risen to become the number one machine translation company. In Germany, it is now the highest valued AI company with an estimated worth of two billion US dollars, ranking it among the legendary “unicorns” – a private company with an extremely high market value. Jaroslaw Kutylowski has managed to achieve what so many business founders can only dream of. He is the source of ideas, the Chief Technical Officer of many years and, since 2019, CEO of DeepL, which was founded under the umbrella of the Linguee online dictionary.

At that time, Kutylowski’s software, which is based on artificial intelligence, offered something entirely new: an online tool that really did translate with near total accuracy while other programmes were only capable of producing a mishmash of jumbled words. The company enjoyed stable financial success right from the start. Despite this, Kutylowski has remained an elusive figure. The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” (NZZ) newspaper described him as a “grounded visionary”. In an interview with the NZZ, he was modest about his achievements. He saw the reason for his steep success curve as being the fact “that we probably made a few right decisions in terms of how the product needed to be developed”[1].

More than 30 languages
 

According to the company’s own information, the DeepL AI language technology is now used by more than 100,000 businesses, public authorities and other organisations, as well as millions of private clients from 63 markets. DeepL now employs 900 people worldwide. The business model is based on paid subscriptions. Users can have up to 5,000 characters translated for free. After that, they need to pay. And more and more people are choosing to do so. Initially, the tool offered translations in German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Spanish. The service has now expanded to include more than 30 languages, with Arabic being its most recent addition. However, Kutylowski is not aiming to offer every single language there is. “We will focus on the ones that are really important in the world”[2], he told the news magazine “Stern”. He is optimistic about the development of artificial intelligence: “We humans always find it hard to accept change. But at the end of the day, I’ve no doubt that AI will prove itself to be extremely useful in many areas. We need to focus on the positive. When used in the right way, AI will make our lives much better.”[3]