Pinch

Hey everyone, we’re Christian and Keyu — co-founders of Pinch.

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

The problem
We’ve felt first-hand how language barriers can actively limit a team’s productivity. High bandwidth communication is vital for collaboration, and while we’ve all 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.

Our solution
We knew there had to be a better way to connect across different languages and cultures, so we started building Pinch. Shortly after, we 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 we're taking on.

We’re currently in public beta with our 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.).

👥 Our 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.

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

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

🙏 Our Ask

• Try Pinch! You can demo it alone or invite a friend to a call for the full experience: https://startpinch.com
• Share this post! Do you know anyone in your network facing language barriers?
• Let us know how we’re doing. You can reach us at founders@startpinch.com