Petr Antropov and Nick Ustinov founded Lokalise in Riga, Latvia, in 2017 after running into the localisation problem first-hand. While building a mobile app that grew past a million users across multiple language markets, they found that existing translation management tools were slow, lacked context, and required tedious manual work. Ustinov, a self-taught developer, built a custom tool to automate translation and maintain context within the app. It proved to be a product with demand well beyond their own needs.

Lokalise has since evolved beyond a traditional translation management system into a full localization platform combining AI orchestration, human translation, and workflow automation. The platform automatically selects between multiple AI engines based on context, language pair and content type, while integrating with over 60 tools including GitHub, GitLab, Figma, Contentful and Zendesk. Teams across product, engineering, design, marketing and localisation use it to translate apps, websites, games and marketing content with continuous localisation baked into their existing workflows.

The company now serves over 3,000 organisations worldwide, including Mastercard, Toyota, HP, Revolut, Notion and Yelp