Purpose-driven innovation and DeepL’s hackathon culture

Ever since DeepL was just a small group of developers and researchers tinkering with the earliest versions of machine translation, we’ve believed that technology and innovation are worth much more when they tackle real-world problems. We wanted to make a difference – addressing challenges that genuinely impact how people live, and the productivity and success of the organizations they’re part of.

That’s why, whenever we dive into experimenting with new features or exploring fresh ways to apply our models, we always do so with an eye toward solving a specific business problem. We always have a clear goal driving our innovation, ensuring that every effort we make is purposeful and impactful.

Hacking with purpose

This belief isn’t just a tagline for us — it’s woven into the very fabric of our company culture. At DeepL, innovation and experimentation are vital, but they come with a strong sense of purpose. We express this through our hackathons, where the focus is all about identifying stubborn challenges and dedicating ourselves to building solutions.

Hack Fridays: Inviting innovative employees to step outside their day-to-day

For many years, we’ve run Hack Fridays, a set day each month when we encourage DeepL’s employees to focus an entire day on a value-driving initiative outside of their day-to-day activity. We’ve designed Hack Fridays around the principle of innovating with purpose, asking tech team members and other employees to submit plans in advance and make sure that the time they invest delivers a tangible outcome. These Hacks regularly involve DeepL teams building prototypes for new features, experimenting with new technologies that they can bring to their work, and improving our internal tools.

DeepHack 2025: Expanding the role of DeepL’s AI platform

In recent months, we’ve rolled our monthly Hack Friday events together to create DeepHack — an intensive, four-day event where employees can collaborate on bold ideas. DeepHack 2025 gives teams a chance to push DeepL into new areas and solve entirely new problems with AI. Tech employees pitch ideas for new products, capabilities and internal tools, and then they recruit teams of colleagues to turn them into functional prototypes. It's a unique opportunity to flex our imaginations and our capabilities, not to mention an incredible team-building experience!

The themes that we ask DeepHack participants to focus tie directly to the areas we’re exploring in DeepL AI Labs, ranging from improving workflows through natural language understanding, to delivering operational intelligence for enterprise organizations, developing multilingual voice experiences, and more. These events have already produced breakthrough innovations applying our AI platform in exciting new ways – including generating prototypes for real-time voice cloning models that can help enable authentic voice-to-voice translation, tools for direct editing of translated PDFs, and integrations of DeepL into the social platform, BlueSky.

Hack for Impact: Encouraging others to innovate with the DeepL API

The DeepL API is designed for developers to make innovative use of DeepL features and capabilities in their own products and services. We support this by taking part in external hacking events that share focus on purposeful innovation. These events generate a wide range of imaginative experiments applying DeepL to different use cases. 

This year, we sponsored Hack for Impact events in San Francisco and New York City, where developers prototyped language-driven solutions for the public good. At one MCP Hackathon, which we co-sponsored with AWS, the winning prototype was a multilingual, voice-activated disaster response system that used DeepL to make critical information accessible in any language.

Where DeepL’s hacking culture is leading us next

Our hacking culture led us first to language: a challenge with sweeping real-world consequences that touch almost everyone on the planet, in many different areas of life. We recognized early on how solving the language challenges of enterprises and other businesses could enable our Language AI models to have the biggest impact. This remains a core focus for DeepL, because the progress we make translates into positive, real-world results.

Today, our hacking culture has expanded to take on other real-world problems. We encourage our people to explore breakthrough solutions that leverage our AI platform for a wide range of new products. In doing so, we’re tapping into the appetite for experimenting, collaborating and exploring that motivates so many of our talented colleagues. Hacking builds skills, strengthens teams, and helps people go further than they ever thought possible. Bringing our people together around exciting new challenges is what our hackathon culture is all about.