DeepL, the Cologne-based AI translation company, said on June 17, 2026 that the team and technology of Mixhalo, a San Francisco startup that streams low-latency live audio to audiences at concerts, sports venues and conferences, had joined the company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
DeepL plans to build Mixhalo's audio infrastructure into DeepL Voice, its real-time voice translation product, so that translated speech and captions can reach crowds ranging from small rooms to tens of thousands of attendees. Mixhalo's San Francisco base becomes DeepL's first office in the city.
The two companies already worked together before the deal. Mixhalo used DeepL as its primary translation provider, and the DeepL Voice API was powering real-time translation on Mixhalo's live-audio platform.
What Mixhalo built
Mixhalo was founded in 2016 by Incubus guitarist and songwriter Mike Einziger, violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger and technologist Vik Singh, who later became chief executive. It started as a way to improve how people hear concerts and expanded into sports and live events.
Its platform sends synchronized, high-fidelity audio to thousands of listeners at once. Singh said the company was built to deliver audio to live audiences of any size within 20 milliseconds. Its clients and partners include MLB, NASCAR, Equinox, Verizon, T-Mobile, the Sacramento Kings, Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre and TSX, and it has worked at CES, Mobile World Congress, Salesforce's main conferences, the Databricks AI Summit and Microsoft AI Tour Paris. Artists who used it include Metallica, Aerosmith, Sting and Charlie Puth.
When Mixhalo moved into real-time translation, Singh said, the hardest part was finding technology fast enough to keep up with live speech. He said DeepL was the only provider among those it tested that met that bar. Talks about a deal began after Singh was seated next to DeepL's chief technology officer at a customer dinner, according to TechCrunch.
“After testing technology from nearly all of the leading providers, DeepL was the only one that could deliver accurate translations at the speed we needed to achieve real fluency.”
Why DeepL is buying
DeepL built its business on text translation and writing tools and has been moving into speech. It launched voice-to-text translation in more than 33 languages in 2024 and a voice-to-voice translation suite in April 2026. The company cited a 2026 independent assessment by Slator that gave DeepL Voice a quality score of 96.4 out of 100 and a 4% failure rate, against a market average of 17%.
Mixhalo gives DeepL a way to take that product beyond online meetings into large live settings, as well as customer support, where the two teams were piloting integrations such as Amazon Connect. Chief executive Jarek Kutylowski said Mixhalo would serve both as a product and as a marketing showcase for DeepL's technology.
"Voice AI is ultimately a fight for latency, quality, and real-world reliability," said DeepL chief technology officer Sebastian Enderlein, who added that the Mixhalo team's location would bring DeepL closer to customers, partners and developers in the San Francisco area.
DeepL said it would serve as the official translation partner of GITEX Europe 2026 at the end of June, providing live German-to-English captions on the main stage, and would show its voice technology at the Databricks Data + AI Summit, the Esri User Conference and Salesforce Dreamforce.
The founders and the funding
Mixhalo raised more than $39 million from investors including Fortress Investment, Founders Fund, Defy Partners and Cowboy Ventures, according to TechCrunch. Tech.eu put the total at nearly $40 million and said Pharrell Williams invested at the seed stage. The amounts and dates of individual rounds were not reported in coverage of the deal.
Neither company said how many Mixhalo employees moved to DeepL or what will happen to Mixhalo's existing contracts with venues and event organizers.
DeepL's push into the US
DeepL was founded in 2017 by Kutylowski and has more than 900 employees. It says more than 200,000 business teams and millions of individuals use its products, and that nearly half of the Fortune 500 are users. Its US customers include NVIDIA, Cisco and Nasdaq, and the company describes the US as its fastest-growing market.
The company is backed by Benchmark, IVP and Index Ventures and was last valued at $2 billion, according to Tech.eu, which also reported that DeepL cut about 250 jobs the month before the Mixhalo deal. Mixhalo competes in live translation with companies including Wordly AI and Palabra.
