Meet Localazy, Winner of Startups of The Year 2024 in Brno, South Moravian Region/Localization | HackerNoon

The special Startups of The Year 2024 Winners Interview series is a celebration of all this year’s Tech Champions. You’ve earned it! The HackerNoon community can’t wait to learn more about your journey!

Tell us about you.

We’re Localazy, a localization platform that helps teams translate digital products efficiently and at scale. Our tools simplify the entire process for teams of all sizes, from startups to global enterprises. Anyone with a website or app can connect to Localazy, extract content, translate it through our intuitive interface, and sync it back seamlessly.

Translate into as many languages as you like, automate the workflow, and free your developers from copy-pasting and manual updates. With support for 50+ frameworks and file formats, plus CLI, API, SDKs, and full CI/CD integration, Localazy fits right into your stack. Set it up once and let it run in the background.

Our platform has one single mission: to remove language as a barrier to digital experiences. We want to help teams speak the language of their users, wherever they are. We envision a digital world where content isn’t trapped in one language. When your product is available in your users’ native language, it simply feels more familiar, more accessible, and more valuable to them.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

We believe access to information shouldn’t be limited by language. Localazy helps companies translate their products into dozens of languages while keeping workflows simple and efficient. Whether it’s a health app that needs to reach users in rural India or a fintech startup expanding across Europe, we help them speak the language of their users — literally. This impacts how people access services, make decisions, and feel included in the digital world.

So, we’re making it easier for teams to launch and grow in new markets. Once companies establish a working localization workflow, they can deliver products that feel native from day one and update their content as needed with the help of automations. From mobile apps to enterprise platforms, we reduce time-to-market, improve customer trust, and make digital access more inclusive across languages.

What sets you apart from the competition?

Two things: flexibility and philosophy. Localazy adapts to how teams work, not the other way around. We don’t force rigid workflows or charge per seat. Whether you want AI pre-translation, a fully human approach, or a community-driven translation model, Localazy can handle it. And behind the tech, there’s a core belief that localization is not just a feature but a strategy. That mindset drives everything we build. Our product was built by a developer who struggled with localizing his own apps, so we started by solving problems for struggling developers from the start, and that has been our focus ever since.

What does it mean for you to win this title?

It’s incredibly rewarding. Recognition like this validates the countless hours our team has put into solving a real problem with a thoughtful product. It’s also a nod to the wider localization community that often works behind the scenes to make products feel native across markets. It also puts a spotlight on a problem that’s often overlooked, despite its growing impact in global business.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to set out for this mission?

Everyone at Localazy shares the same obsession with simplicity and usability. We come from different backgrounds: engineering, linguistics, design, marketing, and we live in different corners of the world, from the Czech Republic to Spain, Estonia, and Poland. We’re a small, hands-on team that enjoys solving real problems and building things that are genuinely useful for our users and for ourselves.

We’re fully remote, but we make a point to gather in person once or twice a year. Our meetups are a chance to reconnect, talk product, and enjoy time together, like in our last summer hackathon, where we brainstormed new ideas, grilled under the stars, and played games late into the night. Not every idea makes it through, and we’re honest about that. But what makes this team special is how closely we listen to our users, how fast we learn from feedback, and how much we care about getting it right, even if it takes time.

Looking back, what milestone was the biggest turning point for your startup?

Localazy was born from a real, personal pain point. Before launching the platform, our founder, Václav Hodek, created a multitasking Android app called Floating Apps, which went on to surpass 10 million downloads. As the app gained traction globally, the demand for localization grew, but managing translations across dozens of languages with existing tools was a constant struggle. That frustration became the spark for Localazy. The success of Floating Apps, powered by Localazy’s early version, proved the value of a better approach to continuous localization and validated our mission from day one.

What’s one valuable lesson you learned this year that you’d pass on to other startups?

Don’t wait for “perfect.” We’ve learned that it’s better to ship small improvements consistently than chase a massive release. Listen to your users, solve their pain point today, and iterate. Momentum matters more than perfection. Big launches are great, but momentum comes from listening to users and acting on feedback quickly. For us, keeping the product in motion — releasing, testing, iterating — has been key to staying relevant and useful.

How do you envision your industry evolving in the coming years, and how will your startup stay ahead?

Localization is shifting from a one-time task to a continuous process. As products evolve quickly, so must their translations. AI will take over more of the initial work, but human oversight will remain crucial. We’re building Localazy to be the bridge between the two — a hybrid model that gets smarter over time without sacrificing quality.

The future of localization will be about speed without sacrificing context or tone. “Context” and “speed” are the keywords here, and we’re in the process of building something that will make context-rich localization even faster and better.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2025?

We see this recognition as a push to raise the bar. That means more collaboration with our community and investing in better documentation for devs, and features for our users. We’re also committed to supporting NGOs and public projects that need help breaking language barriers.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2025?

The main focus this year is on launching our AI-powered context and quality assurance agent. We’re working to make the localization process smarter, more reliable, and easier to manage, especially by improving how translations are handled, reviewed, and delivered. We’re actively testing these features on our own projects to make sure they work in real-world conditions.

Alongside that, we’re always working on improving the overall experience of our product, improving core features, and making it easier for both technical and non-technical users to get more out of Localazy. The focus this year is on doing fewer things, but doing them really well, and making sure core features feel solid, smart, and practical for our users.

2024 has been crazy, with all the new techs, and all the geopolitics fluctuations. What are the impacts of these to your startup, and to your industry as a whole? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

The elephant in the room (Generative AI) has completely changed expectations around speed and quality in translation. Clients want instant results but still expect human nuance. That’s pushed us to innovate on hybrid workflows and work on even bigger, new features we will reveal soon. At the same time, geopolitical shifts have made it more urgent for companies to localize properly — missteps in language can lead to lost trust fast.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

We’ve appreciated the platform for giving voice to startups like ours, who are building quietly but trying to change things for the better. HackerNoon has been a supportive platform for startups and engineers alike. It’s one of the few spaces where both code and context matter, and we appreciate how it highlights the voices behind the tools shaping tomorrow’s internet.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

Never underestimate the impact of language. It’s not just about words but about making people feel seen, understood, and welcome. Keep building. Keep shipping. There’s always a cleaner way to do something, and someone out there is waiting to benefit from it.