A tool for the way it actually feels
We believe translation should preserve how something feels, not just what it says.
How it started
Two writers, one problem.
— Vitalii.I wrote 120,000 words of satirical romance fantasy — mages drowning in debt, a multiverse economy that makes Wall Street look ethical, and a love story tangled up in all of it.
— Mariia.I write semi-fictional stories about real people, built around how it felt. Most of the people I wrote about were foreigners. We met in English, spoke in English, lived those moments in English. So I wrote them that way too. But I sometimes wonder what version of them I missed by not writing them in their language.
— Vitalii.The same flatness hit me from the other side. Every tool I tried preserved the words but killed the voice — tone, rhythm, wit, emotional texture. Nothing held. It all came back flatter than it went in.
— Both of us.So we did what we know how to do. We read the machine-translation papers. We benchmarked Claude, GPT, Gemini, and a handful of open models on the same 50-page chapter — judging accuracy, tone, and whether the satire still landed. None of them held all three; each failed in a different way. So we built the tool we wished had existed when we started.
Who built this
We’re Mariia and Vitalii — co-founders of Transept and the entire team. We met at Litero AI, an earlier AI writing startup, where Mariia ran product and product marketing and Vitalii led AI engineering. We left to build Transept full-time in September 2025.
Mariia Ivakhnenko, co-founder
Three degrees in English Language and Literature: a BA from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, an MA from the University of Ostrava, and an Erasmus year at Universität Salzburg. Multilingual — Ukrainian native, English at full professional proficiency (IELTS 7.0), conversational Czech, learning German.
Came into AI as a prompt engineer at Litero in 2023, moved into product, then product marketing. Built the email/lifecycle program from scratch — Customer.io + PostHog behavioral triggers, onboarding tied to activation milestones, retention flows. Anthropic Claude Code in Action certified (Mar 2026). Now also handles email/lifecycle at Snov.io alongside Transept.
Outside the day job, she writes semi-fictional stories about real people, built around how it felt. Work in progress, unpublished. The question of what gets lost between languages is the question she keeps coming back to.
Vitalii Vlasiuk, co-founder
Bachelor’s in Language & Literature from Kyiv National Linguistics University, then a turn into software. Ukrainian native, English at full professional proficiency, learning German.
Senior AI engineer at Litero AI (Nov 2023 – Dec 2025), shipping production LLM features to 50,000 monthly active users — RAG microservices, agentic writing tools, fine-tuned models, multi-LLM-as-judge evaluation pipelines that moved output quality from borderline-passing to A-level, measured by professional graders. Now a machine learning engineer at SumUp, building AI assistants for merchants alongside Transept. Three years of fractional AI/automation consulting on the side — Deloitte healthcare AI pipelines, fintech assistants, gamedev LangGraph agents.
Also a novelist on the slow path. 120,000 words of satirical romance fantasy in a drawer somewhere. The friction between AI translation tools and his own prose is what set this whole thing in motion.
Where this is going
Right now, Transept handles documents — upload, translate, edit sentence by sentence, export. But the goal is bigger: a workspace where everything you write can exist in any language without losing what made it yours. Better glossaries that learn from you. Tighter integrations with the tools you already use. And translation quality that keeps getting closer to what a great human translator would do — except in minutes, not weeks.
Say hi
We’re reachable. Word travels.