At twelve, Jarek Kutylowski sat down in a German classroom and could not understand a word.
He had been born in Poland and moved to Germany at that age, and he has said he went to school there without speaking German. A speaker biography adds a second detail: he had been programming since he was ten. Put those together and you get a boy for whom language was a wall and code was a way over it.
What almost nobody outside Cologne expected was where it would be built.
He became a computer scientist and ended up at Linguee, an online dictionary that matched words to real translated sentences and paid for itself with advertising. By 2016 Kutylowski, the company's chief technology officer, was leading a team building something different inside it: a translation system based on neural networks. He saw, he later told interviewers, that these networks could make a breakthrough in machine translation, and he decided to build something great.
What almost nobody outside Cologne expected was where it would be built. On 28 August 2017 the system launched as DeepL Translator, and the company behind Linguee became DeepL GmbH. At launch it ran on a 5.1-petaflop supercomputer in Iceland, powered by hydroelectric and geothermal energy. Seven languages at first: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch. Reviewers noticed that the output sounded less like a machine and more like a person. They also noticed that Google offered far more languages.
The next years were a slow narrowing of that gap. Windows and Mac software came in 2019, the year he became CEO. Chinese and Japanese arrived in 2020. In January 2023 a funding round of about EUR100m valued the company at EUR1bn, making it Cologne's most valuable startup. In May 2024 a US$300m round lifted the value to US$2bn.
The hard part is that the ground keeps moving. A 2025 academic benchmark ranked general-purpose AI models above DeepL on translation, and the company has answered with its own translation language model in 2024, an AI agent in 2025 and voice-to-voice translation in 2026. It now serves more than 200,000 business customers.
The lesson is hidden in his childhood. The person who knows how it feels to be unable to say what you mean is often the one who builds the tool for it.