Language I/O, the Cheyenne-based language technology company that recently received $6.5 million in Series A funding, announced significant growth for the company earlier this week — including the appointment of two new executives.
The company, which increased its headcount by 62% in 2021, recently appointed Diego Bartolome as its new chief technology officer (CTO) and Viviana Bertinetto as the company’s chief customer officer (CCO). Bartolome joins the company after an extensive career in technology, working at both TransPerfect and Microsoft, while Bertinetto was promoted to CCO after working at the company for the past half a decade.
“We’re proud to announce these valuable additions to the Language I/O C-suite executive team,” said Heather Shoemaker, the company’s founder and CEO.
Language I/O started out 2021 with just 12 employees, a number which has grown significantly in the past year: the company’s current headcount amounts to 55 employees. In addition to its increased number of employees, Language I/O stated that the company was also able to triple its machine translation output in the past year.
“It makes me so proud to have experienced our growth and to now see how far we’ve come,” Bertinetto told MultiLingual, noting that she used to “marvel” at what the company was able to achieve with such a small team in her early days at the company. “It’s rare to be able to work and brainstorm with all the internal stakeholders as well as leadership in the company and I have been lucky to do so from the beginning while carving my own unique path with Language I/O.”
Bertinetto continued, adding that she believes the company will continue its momentum into the coming year. “Our customers will continue to be at the center of what we do and I know that the meaningful relationships that we have built with them over the years will only continue to deepen as we get further into 2022 and beyond,” she said.
The last time MultiLingual checked in with the company, Shoemaker said Language I/O would be focusing on the development and improvement of multilingual chatbot technology in the coming year. Bartolome and Bertinetto echoed this point, noting that Language I/O’s Self-Improving Glossary (SIGLO) technology will be a key asset in improving automated customer support services. “Chatbots are key to scale customer support in general and multilingual customer support in particular,” Bartolome said.
Bartolome added that the coming year will see even further improvements in the company’s SIGLO technology, among other developments. “The tech approach at Language I/O is unique and probably the best I’ve seen in the industry,” he said. “Some exciting improvements that will come this year are related to speech/voice interactions and chatbots, active learning processes for SIGLO and for translation, as well as improved real-time engine selection and MT quality estimation, among others.”