Nick Ustinov

Nick Ustinov is a co-founder of Lokalise, a translation and localization management system that software teams use to ship apps and websites in many languages. He is a Latvian serial entrepreneur who started his first internet company in the late 1990s and now serves as Lokalise's chief innovation officer.

Creating Latvia's First Email Service

He was an early adopter of internet technology in his native Latvia and in the late 1990s founded and developed inbox.lv, the country's first email service, which remains one of the most popular sites in the region, according to his Forbes Technology Council profile. A later project was Roamer, an app that helped travelers avoid roaming fees on their phones, and it passed a million users.

Translating the Roamer App

Roamer was technical and asked users to follow instructions closely, so translations needed context, and there was a lot of text in many languages. Translation agencies wanted the strings in Word or Excel files, which meant his developers had to extract and reinsert text by hand and often got results that lost their context, he wrote in Forbes. Existing translation management systems were built mainly for translators, so he built his own developer-friendly tool to pull strings out of the app and push translations back in.

Signing Lokalise's First Seven Customers

When he told friends and acquaintances how he had solved the problem, some paid to use the tool on their own projects, and that money pushed him to make it a standalone product. Six months later Lokalise had Stripe subscriptions and seven customers, all friends and friends of friends. "I was coding. My co-founder did customer calls," he wrote, adding that even then the founding team did not know what "SaaS" meant.

His co-founder was Petr Antropov, and the company grew into a fully remote business with about 2,500 customers in 80 countries by the time it raised a $50 million Series B led by CRV, according to PR Newswire. Support stayed a whole-team job from the start, with everyone in the support chat to answer customers quickly.

Handing the CEO Role to Sophie Krishnan

After seven years running Lokalise, Ustinov and Antropov handed the chief executive role to Sophie Krishnan in October 2023, he announced on the Lokalise blog. "It's essential that Lokalise has everything it needs to scale both faster and larger," he wrote. Antropov became chief strategy officer, and Ustinov stayed on as chief innovation officer focused on new products, including AI.