This is a terrific conversation about a SaaS-enabled BPO company, Lilt, in the domain of language translation. Sramana Mitra: Let's start introducing our audience to yourself as well as Lilt. Spence Green: I am the CEO of Lilt. We have two parts of our business. The private sector of our business focuses on creating global customer experiences so that all products and services are available in all languages. We work with enterprises that want to make the user experience in other languages better. Usually, it is as good and personalized as it is in English. We have a public sector business that also works with language. We make it possible for governments to augment the language capabilities that they have primarily for defense and intelligence reasons. These are unified by a common technology that we have built over the past 10 years. This is all done under the mission of making the world's information available irrespective of where you were born or what language you speak.

SDL is suing Silicon Valley startup Lilt, alleging patent infringement. In a lawsuit dated April 3, 2017 and filed in the Northern District of California, SDL said Lilt had violated three of its patents and "continues to interfere" with the marketing and sales of SDL products, threatening SDL's relationships with its customers. The patents referred to in the lawsuit are US patents granted Language Weaver, which SDL had acquired in the summer of 2010. Language Weaver was co-founded in 2002 by Daniel Marcu, who eventually joined SDL as Chief Technology Officer post-acquisition. Marcu went on to become the company's Chief Science Officer before moving to Amazon in December 2016 as Director of Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing.