Pinch recently launched!

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^{"Video conferencing with real-time voice translation"}

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TL;DR Pinch is an online meeting platform that enables immersive international video calls. The Pinch platform translates your voice in real-time so you can speak and understand over 30 languages. Watch the demo here, or try it for free on the website.}

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‍Founded by Christian Safka & Keyu Chen‍

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👥 The team

Christian — 10 years of experience launching software and AI-native products 0→1, ex-TPM at Microsoft and most recently the Head of ML at Tavus (YC S21).

Keyu — Multimodal and computer vision researcher for over 7 years, working across academia and industry.

The founders met at Tavus, and together have led engineering, research, and product teams from seven countries!

After a long experience building conversation AI video/audio, they're incredibly excited to see what these technologies can unlock for human<>human communication.

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The Problem

The Pinch team has felt first-hand how language barriers can actively limit a team’s productivity. High bandwidth communication is vital for collaboration, and while communication technologies have moved from IRC → VoIP → Video Conferencing, the existing translation tools still operate in low-bandwidth mediums (mostly caption transcriptions). This makes conversations difficult because 1) converting audio to text before translation is slower, 2) you lose all information of how something was said, and 3) you’re no longer having a face-to-face meeting.

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The Solution

The knew there had to be a better way to connect across different languages and cultures, so they started building Pinch. Shortly after, they found out how challenging translation truly was.  Balancing latency/accuracy for chunk-based audio translation, capturing inflection and tonality per statement, handling culturally specific phrasing, and making a seamless meeting experience are all unsolved problems Pinch is taking on.

They’re currently in public beta with their own meeting platform, supporting live use-cases in personal connections (e.g. meeting in-laws for the first time), as well as business (foreign clients, international sales, inter-team comms.).

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Learn More

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^{🌐 Visit startpinch.com to learn more.}

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^{💥 Try Pinch here! You can demo it alone or invite a friend to a call for the full experience.}

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^{📢 Share this post! Do you know anyone in your network facing language barriers?}

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^{🤝 Let the team know how they’re doing. You can reach the founders via email here.}

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^{‍‍👣 Follow Pinch on LinkedIn & X.}

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