Zoom, the popular video conferencing platform that rose to fame during the global pandemic, is set to buy up a fairly new startup company.

The startup company, also known as Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – kites, GmbH (“Kites”), develops real-time Machine Translation (MT) solutions.

Key Highlights

• Kites was founded in 2015 by co-founders Dr. Alex Waibel and Dr. Sebastian Stüker, who are from Germany.
  
• Upon the acquisition, Kites and its team of 12 research scientists will focus on helping Zoom's engineering team build real-time machine translation into all of their communication and productivity products.
• Kites claims that its system has an error rate of around 5% when it comes to translation, with approximately 1-second delay behind a person's speech.

Why It Matters

• Zoom is progressing towards a new era of video conferencing, where the barriers of language could eventually be broken.
  
• With real-time machine translation built into Zoom, people all over the world could speak to each other face-to-face, and conduct business meetings more effectively.
• As of March 2021, Zoom had $4.2 billion in cash, with plans to acquire more companies to strengthen its business over time.