Zoom to acquire Kites GmbH to enhance machine translation capabilities

4th July 2021

Zoom Video Communications has announced a new acquisition to improve upon its translation capabilities.

Zoom Video Communications, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – Kites, GmbH (“Kites”), a start-up dedicated to developing real-time Machine Translation (“MT”) solutions. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Kites was founded in 2015 and have academic roots with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where co-founders Dr Alex Waibel and Dr Sebastian Stüker are faculty members. Kites’ talented team of 12 research scientists will help Zoom’s engineering team advance the field of MT to improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multi-language translation capabilities for Zoom users.

“We are continuously looking for new ways to deliver happiness to our users and improve meeting productivity, and MT solutions will be key in enhancing our platform for Zoom customers across the globe,” said Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering at Zoom. “With our aligned missions to make collaboration frictionless – regardless of language, geographic location, or other barriers – we are confident Kites’ impressive team will fit right in with Zoom.”

“Kites emerged with the mission of breaking down language barriers and making seamless cross-language interaction a reality of everyday life, and we have long admired Zoom for its ability to easily connect people across the world,” said Dr Waibel and Dr Stüker. “We know Zoom is the best partner for Kites to help advance our mission and we are excited to see what comes next under Zoom’s incredible innovation engine.”

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Dr. Stüker and the rest of the Kites team will remain based in Karlsruhe, Germany, where Zoom looks forward to investing in growing the team. Zoom is exploring opening an R&D centre in Germany in the future. Dr Waibel will become a Zoom Research Fellow, a role in which he will advise on Zoom’s MT research and development.

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