Vasco Pedro’s journey to AI Whisperer and co-founder and CEO of the translation platform Unbabel began with comic books and a love of language. “I grew up with sci-fi, the Marvel superheroes,” says Pedro. “An imaginative world of humans being able to exceed their capabilities.”
Pedro already had a superpower. The boy who dreamed of Spider-Man powers came of age in Lisbon with a globe-trotting Fulbright scholar mother who earned her undergraduate degree at the Sorbonne and her PhD in Stockholm. Surrounded by intellectuals speaking other languages, Vasco learned French, English, Spanish, even a little Greek. He went on to study Language and Knowledge Engineering at the University of Lisbon, then won his own Fulbright, then leapt to Carnegie Mellon, the world’s top-ranked university for language and technologies.
“I always knew I wanted to study in the US,” says Pedro. “It was wonderful. Just amazing. I’d never experienced a real American campus. The integrated experience. The cross-pollination. Not just studying, but the social life: golf, tennis, and intramural sports – a lot of good vibes.”
His plan to spend two years in America getting a master’s expanded to six years and a PhD in Language Technologies.
Surfing for his next Startup
Part of a new generation of Portuguese techies educated at elite American Universities who would lead the nation’s nascent startup ecosystem, Vasco returned to Lisbon in 2009, and promptly failed in his first two startups.
Then in the spring of 2013, while leading a surfing trip in Aliezur with colleagues, he found his next big thing. Fatefully, the trip included another American-educated PhD, João Graça, one of a group of hungry young entrepreneurs bound to a common goal. Vasco had given his colleagues a purple notebook to brainstorm and record their thoughts. Ideas began to align around “making the world a place without language barriers,” recalled team member Sofia Pessanha. “A place where everyone could understand and be understood. In any language.”
Vasco, Graça, Pessanha, and their other co-founders Bruno Silva and Hugo Silva named the new venture Unbabel. They quickly cobbled together a prototype of their machine translation language tool, and on a lark applied for the famous Y Combinator incubator in San Francisco, 9,000 kilometers away.
There was immediate local interest. A Lisbon-based VC firm gave them “a term sheet that we thought was great. A proposed 300,000 euro investment.” But the same day they received an email from YC with a tantalizing cross-Atlantic invitation: “We want to see you!”
The team rolled the dice and flew to San Francisco. “We thought we could control the interview,” recalls Vasco of the all-star judging panel of Mike Seibel, Garry Tan, Geoff Ralston, and Sam Altman.
Yet within minutes they were hit with a blizzard of questions. “It was not going where we wanted it to,” he recalls. “We couldn’t even show the demo.” Then, just as they were nearly shown the door, João Graça held up his laptop with a primitive machine translation demo – and luckily it didn’t crash. Later that day, Garry Tan phoned: “We’d love you guys at the next YC.”
The four-man, one-woman team shared a spartan one-bedroom apartment. Throughout the winter of 2014 they rode to YC on bikes, and worked around the clock. “It was totally unglamorous,” recalls Pedro. “But we were connected with great mentors, and it was true acceleration – we did one year’s work in 3 months!”
The team quickly raised $1.5 million, and Vasco began doing trans-Atlantic laps – six weeks in Portugal, then two weeks in San Francisco. By 2019, Unbabel had raised $91 million for their enterprise language translations startup, and earned major international customers from all sectors: airlines, hotel chains, tech firms and multinational corporations.
The CEO never forgot his boyhood Superhero dream
And yet, even as he realized one big dream, Pedro kept an eye on other opportunities. One day back in 2016, during a particularly boring meeting, he wondered, “What if I could do more things than I can right now?” Like say, silently respond to emails or messages without typing?
Carnegie Mellon had brought him close to legendary innovators on the frontiers of brain-computer interface design, so he was familiar with current research on bio-signals and MRI brain scans. “I’d had exposure to a lot of this. The technology is advancing, and I’m thinking, ‘There’s a set of bio-signals we can pretty reliably read at this point from the brain.’”
Pedro excitedly shared his Superhero daydream with his VP of innovation, Paulo Dimas. Instead of telling his boss that was a silly sci-fi idea, Dimas was all in.
Immediately, Pedro recalls, “we started brainstorming and I convinced him, ‘Look, here’s how we do this. We’ll break it down into problems to solve. Get the bio-signals, and create a language.” Dimas led the project, pulling in interns and part-timers as needed. “It was a skunkworks, a 20% project type of thing,” explains Pedro. “Just to get a proof of concept.”
Progress was slow.
They tried using EEGs to pick up the bio-signals, but the technology was “too noisy.” They kept at it, even while focused on Unbabel. Two years ago, Dimas felt it needed more attention, and pushed Pedro “to really invest more in this. Increase the resources.” They met with Portugal’s Minister of Technology, who loved the concept, and encouraged them “to think of this as part of something bigger.”
That’s when Dimas had the idea to make the project part of what became a €78 million EU-funded consortium. He’s now the CEO of Responsible AI, leading 10 AI startups, 7 research centers, and multiple industry leaders to spark the next generation of AI products.
Riding the Chat GPT Wave
Early this spring in Lisboa, Dimas was in full geek mode, bouncing around the busy office with sensors attached to his arm, all the while training his AI persona – my first peek at what became Halo. The world of AI had been turned upside-down with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT a few months before – and Dimas smartly rode the new wave to accelerate Halo.
One of their early tests was conducted with a Portuguese ALS sufferer, who found Halo a massive improvement over the traditional eye trackers used to communicate via computer. Millions suffer from ALS, a neurodegenerative disease characterized by muscle atrophy that affects speech capabilities, and locked-in syndrome, a rare disorder of the nervous system also resulting in paralysis. Dimas believed their invention could open a powerful new channel for ALS and locked-in syndrome patients to communicate with their families and doctors.
By chance, the very next day they had a pivotal test with the Halo team, and Dimas confessed he didn’t know how it would go. He and Pedro happened to be planning a trip to San Francisco in a few weeks, in late May. An idea began to take root: why not take Halo along for the ride? After all, where better than to test a new tech product than Silicon Valley?
And here’s where I stepped in. As a longtime member of Shack15, San Francisco’s premier entrepreneurs’ club, I got a spot on the calendar and brought in Pedro Pinto, the Consul General of Portugal in San Francisco, for a few introductory remarks. Then I interviewed Pedro briefly, and made way for his demo.
Halo’s Silicon Valley Debut
Dimas pulled up the Telegram application on the big screen, and Pedro stood up. As he would later do in Portugal, Pedro faced the crowd and could not see the screen behind him. To prove the point, we blindfolded him with a red bandana.
“What’s your favorite Portuguese food?” we typed, the words appearing behind him for all to see.
Pedro had a look of total concentration. He was very still. A few seconds passed, and then the words flashed on the screen: “My favorite Portuguese food is definitely grilled Sardines with roasted potatoes.”
“And what do you like to drink?” Another pause. That same intense look of concentration.
“I enjoy tea, especially in the morning.”
It looked like mind reading, but it was arguably something superior, with far greater potential. Pedro was not just hearing the question, his ChatGPT Large Language Model (LLM) trained persona was offering up potential answers that he responded to with an imperceptible contraction of this hand – a bio-signal.
How did Pedro answer queries without speaking or appearing to move? Invisible to the audience was Pedro’s “E-Skin” EMG interface – sleeves on his arms developed at the University of Coimbra by Professor Mahmoud Tavakoli’s Soft and Printed Microelectronics Laboratory that allowed him to select and adapt answers.
Superhuman Capabilities
Three weeks later, I organized another event at the RedBridge Palácio in Lisbon for Pedro to debut Halo, right where the legendary poet Fernando Pessoa once practiced astrology. TechCrunch, tech’s international bible, caught wind and visited Pedro and Dimas.
“Communication using thought alone?” asked the TechCrunch headline. “Unbabel unveils AI project to give us superhuman capabilities.” The glowing, detailed article began with wonder: “Here I was, sitting in the offices of enterprise language translation services startup Unbabel, opposite founder and CEO Vasco Pedro, testing what appeared to be a brain-to-computer interface. And it was pretty astounding.” The dreams of the boy whose imagination soared while reading Marvel Comics seemed to be coming to pass.
Tech today is about the power of the platform, the ability to scale new human capabilities internationally and across borders. Attracting international media gave Halo wings. Pedro sent the article to WebSummit, and this November, he and Dimas and another team member were invited to open the afternoon session in the main arena.
There’s arguably no greater way to make an early-stage splash than Europe’s biggest tech startup conference. It’s been a good year for the AI Whisperer.
Last week, Unbabel received a fresh infusion of $21 million from VC firms. That makes it Portugal’s eighth tech startup unicorn, with $112 million dollars in funding, more cash to help achieve its mission of using language to “create universal understanding between cultures, companies and customers.”
Expanded testing Halo with ALS patients began this fall in a collaboration with the Champalimaud Foundation, adding new meaning and urgency to the project. Says Pedro: “There’s something really magical when you go from, ‘Oh, this is cool!’ to having someone using Halo who cannot express themselves in any other way.”
OpenAI, headed by Sam Altman, one of the original judges at Unbabel’s Y Combinator pitch, will soon feature Halo as a public case study. At a time when the world is questioning the risks of AI (the EU just passed the AI Act, a sweeping new law that will regulate the use of artificial intelligence), this is a great opportunity to showcase the application of these breakthrough technologies for good.
But Pedro also senses this is just the start. As one of the world’s first humans to carry on “internal” conversations with his AI persona, he knows the tremendous potential: “It’s about connecting your biological brain with computational abilities that augment your capabilities.” In other words, Halo will offer a third brain beyond our limbic system and neocortex: the long-imagined brain machine fusion.
“At some point,” Pedro says, “We’ll stop perceiving this as external. It will just be us, right?”
*Jonathan Littman is the co-founder of RedBridge Lisbon and author of The New California Dream is in Portugal. Playboy Mag writer. Author of two international innovation bestsellers.
If you want to know more about Jonathan and RedBridge, follow his monthly articles in Mensagem in this partnership with RedBridge.
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