João Graça

João Graça is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Unbabel, a Y Combinator-backed artificial intelligence and language operations platform based in Lisbon, Portugal. Before launching the startup, which has raised over $90 million to provide machine translation services for global clients like Airbnb, he earned a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing and served as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Under his technical leadership, Unbabel expanded its enterprise capabilities by acquiring the language service provider Lingo24 in December 2021 and the website translation solution Bablic in early 2023. Beyond his corporate work, he co-founded the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School to advance academic research in unsupervised learning and machine translation. Graça currently focuses on the future of large language models, recently discussing how they might replace neural machine translation architectures in the industry.