Sunday’s Super Bowl was broadcast in some 30 languages around the world, an effort that likely required dozens of play-by-play teams and translators and plenty of coordination from the league office. That may become a thing of the past as near-instant play-by-play translation with AI into seemingly any language is already quietly deployed on American TVs.
Leading this effort in sports broadcasting is Lingopal, a low-profile startup from Microsoft and Tesla veterans. Lingopal uses AI models trained in foreign languages to translate live sports announcers into dozens of languages, from Arabic to Ukrainian, while mimicking the voice and cadence of the original play-by-play caller. The 18-month-old company is already making seven figures in revenue from broadcast contracts with at least one of the top four North American sports leagues, says CEO Deven Orie, although he declined to disclose the league citing contractual restrictions.
“With sports, there is a big need to globalize right now,” Orie said on a phone call. “If an entertainment company or broadcast company wanted to translate their content, they would have to hire somebody. It’s extremely expensive, it’s tedious, and viewership rates don’t necessarily go up when you have a third-party vendor being a commentator for you.”
The idea is attracting some hefty backers. Later Wednesday, Lingopal will announce that it has received $14 million in venture capital funding from DCM Ventures, Marquee Ventures and Scrum Ventures.
A Silicon Valley pioneer in early stage investing, DCM now has deep ties in Asia and may be best known for making multiple billions of dollars backing Kuaishou, a Chinese short-video platform similar to TikTok. Marquee is the VC business spun off from the Cubs, backed by the Ricketts family and featuring GameChanger’s Sameer Ahuja as an advisor. Scrum is backed by a series of deep-pocketed Japanese conglomerates, with its sports and entertainment fund led by former NBA executive Michael Proman.
“The goal is to broaden the base, make the broadcast more accessible,” Proman said on a phone call. “They’re working with some of the biggest names in the space right now. Theoretically, a future Super Bowl wouldn’t need 18 separate broadcast networks around the world.”
In addition to the three headline VC firms, the Series A funding round includes investment from a series of individual investors, including Fubo CEO David Gandler and COO Alberto Horihuela. The names of some other high-net-worth investors aren’t being publicly disclosed.
“We could have closed on a lot more, but we decided this was the right amount to get us to the next stage as a company,” said Orie, who co-founded the business with Casey Schneider, a long-time Tesla software engineer and also a StubHub veteran. “It was mainly strategic: who brought on a lot of value and allows us to expand into the sports and media vertical as quickly as possible.”
Like seemingly everything else in the AI world, the opportunity is quickly opening up, and Lingopal isn’t the only venture in the translation world. There are about two dozen AI translation start-ups operating right now that have received nearly $350 million in funding, according to data from Tracxn, which compiles VC and PE activity worldwide. Easily the biggest player is London-based Synthesia, valued at over $2 billion after investment from NVIDIA and others. It specializes in generating AI avatars speaking foreign languages from English scripts.
But most services like Synthesia reflect the staid approach of their corporate target market—think a video version of the stock photography ubiquitous on company websites. Sports broadcasts thrive on emotion and the quirks of the commentators. Lingopal appears to be able to preserve that, recreating the voice and timing of announcers in any language. And while translation is quickly becoming commoditized thanks to AI, the service says it has solved a major problem: the dubbing that makes games feel distant to watchers by drowning out the sounds of the game—the murmur of the crowd and bouncing of the ball, or the “walla” as it’s called in Hollywood sound design.
Still, Lingopal isn’t alone in pursuing live sports. Last year Camb.ai, backed with $4 million seed funding from Jerry Jones’ Blue Star Innovation and Courtside Ventures among others, broadcast an MLS Next Pro match with AI translation into French, Portuguese and Spanish. The company says on its website it “seamlessly” worked. Other sports broadcasts haven’t been publicly disclosed since, as Camb.ai seems to be casting its net more widely into cinema and YouTube adaptations.
The top-tier pro league using Lingopal today offers five major languages through its subscription live-game and on-demand service. That contract is for one year at the moment as the league evaluates it, according to Proman. But Orie says Lingopal has enough deals in the works he expects its seven-figure revenue will grow at least fourfold in the coming year, with some of the VC funding going to boost headcount by 50% to back expansion.
“Lingopal.ai has allowed us to translate live German commentary into English for broadcast in North America in real time for our DEL hockey team from Germany, the Berlin Eisbären,” Kelly Cheeseman, the chief operating officer of L.A. Kings owner AEG, said in a statement provided to Sportico.
Former Dodgers general manager Dan Evans, now working as a baseball consultant, has also used Lingopal with at least one client, according to Orie. In a statement, Evans called Lingopal “seismic” for sports and media. “Its AI-powered commentary makes viewing live sports in any language feel natural and enhances the entire experience,” he said.
Lingopal estimates the sports commentary translation is a $56 billion market and that it can meet the desire for translation for any language in the world—it takes about two weeks to train its AI sufficiently to translate a game, including learning sports-specific slang and translating jargon in a way that sounds natural to the listener.
The service isn’t perfect. For example, foreign language bettors could be at a disadvantage with in-game wagering given the service isn’t quite instantaneous. Though Lingopal takes as little as two seconds to translate depending on network latency, it still requires delaying the live broadcast, though most viewers don’t notice, similar to the seven-second profanity delay used on some live broadcasts. There are also possible pitfalls with intellectual property around mimicking the voice of a player or a famous broadcaster that could emerge.
For his part, Orie is looking ahead to the evolution of his offerings to sports, especially AI announcer coverage for games where there is no human announcer present. Lingopal’s AI vision will detect what’s going on the screen and take information from what’s occurring off-screen and produce commentary, he predicts.
“We’re moving to a phase where media companies have the ability the increase viewership consumption at scale without much effort at all,” Orie said.
