--- name: Lingo.dev title: >- How Lingo.dev clears enterprise security reviews without a single database question description: >- Lingo.dev is the localization engineering platform behind retrieval augmented localization, translation APIs with a memory for glossary, brand voice, and quality. It has run on Supabase since day one. company_url: 'https://lingo.dev' industry: - ai - developer-tools region: North America company_size: startup supabase_products: - database - vector - auth - storage date: '2026-08-26' --- > Buy the encapsulation, and spend your resources only on your own category. Supabase encapsulates > the database layer so completely that we get to spend every engineering hour on localization > engineering infrastructure, which is the only place our customers can tell the difference. Our > users put it in a way I can't improve on: Stripe for payments, Supabase for databases, Lingo.dev > for localization. > > *— Max Prilutskiy, Co-founder and CEO, Lingo.dev* [Lingo.dev](https://lingo.dev) is the localization engineering platform behind retrieval augmented localization. Teams configure localization engines, translation APIs that hold the glossary, brand voice, and quality rules for a product, and every translation request pulls that context before it runs. Lingo.dev has run on Supabase since day one. Lingo.dev started as a hackathon project in late 2023. The first version translated strings and nothing else. Users asked for more almost immediately. > We were getting so many feature requests that we had to stop and reconsider what the technology > actually was. What our users were describing wasn't a translation tool. It was a platform they > could engineer on. > > *— Max Prilutskiy, Co-founder and CEO, Lingo.dev* Max built the company with co-founder Veronica Prilutskaya, moved it from Barcelona to San Francisco, took it through Y Combinator's F24 batch, and raised $4.2M to scale it. ## The challenge Max and Veronica had built and sold a company before Lingo.dev. It ran on a non-relational document database, and the choice followed them for years. > We had all this data and we couldn't touch it the way we wanted. You can do the basics, but every > serious question we wanted to ask of our own data ran into the limits of the store we picked on > day one. The workarounds we built were incompatible with how we want infrastructure to work. > > *— Veronica Prilutskaya, Co-founder and CPO, Lingo.dev* ## Why they chose Supabase When Max and Veronica started Lingo.dev, the database was not up for debate. > We'd known Supabase since it launched. We'd tried it and knew: next company, this is what we build > on. It's relational, it's managed, and we never think about upgrading Postgres versions ourselves. > It was an obvious choice. > > *— Veronica Prilutskaya, Co-founder and CPO, Lingo.dev* The decision predates everything else about the company, including its investors. Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone later joined as an investor in Lingo.dev. By then, Lingo.dev had already run on Supabase for its entire existence. The choice also shaped Lingo.dev's approach to compliance. Most startups treat SOC 2 as something to get once an enterprise deal demands it. Lingo.dev designed its security posture before writing its first line of code. > SOC 2 isn't a growth milestone anymore. It's table stakes. If you don't have it, you aren't taken > seriously. GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, where data lives, which regions: the architecture was shaped > around those requirements from day one. As a localization infrastructure company, we treat > security seriously. > > *— Max Prilutskiy, Co-founder and CEO, Lingo.dev* ## How Lingo.dev runs on Supabase Everything business critical at Lingo.dev lives in Supabase, including customers' localization engine configurations, glossaries, brand voices, customer organizations, and the embeddings that power the platform. When a translation request reaches a localization engine, Lingo.dev breaks the source content into phrases, embeds them, and runs a similarity search against the context corpus's vector indices using pgvector on Supabase. That search retrieves the terms, voice, and rules that match, and injects them into the model's context before it generates a translation. This retrieval step is what makes a localization engine stateful, and it runs entirely on Postgres. > pgvector played a real role in the decision, and it keeps earning it. We're happy with the > performance. Our retrieval augmented localization runs on Postgres, period. > > *— Veronica Prilutskaya, Co-founder and CPO, Lingo.dev* Auth turned into an unexpected advantage. Because Lingo.dev's users are rows in the same Postgres database as the rest of the system, the team never had to sync an external identity provider or maintain a separate cache to keep user data consistent. > If we ever had to leave Supabase, that's what I'd miss first: never having to be our own database > administrators. > > *— Max Prilutskiy, Co-founder and CEO, Lingo.dev* That advantage showed up early. While the team was closing its first enterprise customer, the prospect asked for Google sign in. Lingo.dev only had password auth at the time. > We were a bit nervous, and then we realized Google auth was already built into Supabase. It took a > couple of minutes to configure. We shipped it almost immediately, and the prospect was impressed > with how fast we moved. > > *— Veronica Prilutskaya, Co-founder and CPO, Lingo.dev* Lingo.dev now uses the Supabase MCP server as part of its development workflow. The team's AI tooling works with the database directly. ## Zero questions, every security review Lingo.dev's customers include Mistral AI, the Solana Foundation, and Veriff, an identity verification company whose infosec reviews rank among the toughest in software. None of those reviews has ever raised a question about the database. > We've been through some heavy procurement and security reviews, including companies that verify > identity for a living. The database layer has never been a question. Not negotiated, not > remediated. No questions, every time. > > *— Max Prilutskiy, Co-founder and CEO, Lingo.dev* Building a SOC 2 ready database layer in house would have meant an operational burden Lingo.dev's team could not justify at YC speed. Max estimates the choice has saved the company two or more engineering hires, since the data layer runs without a dedicated database administrator. > Every time a fundamentally new technology appears, Supabase ships the integration the same week. > Almost nobody talks about this, and it might be the most underrated thing about them. A company > building on Supabase inherits that speed. > > *— Max Prilutskiy, Co-founder and CEO, Lingo.dev* ## The results - Zero database questions across every enterprise security review, including reviews from Mistral AI, the Solana Foundation, and Veriff - Zero database incidents since Lingo.dev started - 90 seconds from signup to a production database - At least two engineering hires avoided because the database runs itself - 25% of the Supabase platform in use, already worth the Team plan ## What's next Lingo.dev plans to keep growing without growing headcount to match. Max says the team would rather invest in better tooling for the people already there than hire for every function Supabase already covers. Lingo.dev also uses its own product on itself: the company's websites, content, and communications are localized through Lingo.dev, on localization engines that run on Supabase.