"You can use a certain phrase that makes sense in Australia," Minh said, "and it lands completely wrong in Asia."
He points to the infamous story of Pepsi’s launch campaign in China, where its tagline was reportedly translated as a promise to bring your ancestors back from the dead.
Whether or not the story unfolded exactly that way, it captures a problem Minh sees constantly: too many companies treat translation as a word-for-word exercise, rather than a cultural one.
Hyperlocalise helps fix that. A marketing agency wants a consistent presence across Europe. A fast-scaling SaaS company is hiring engineers across multiple countries, but as the team grows, context gets lost. A product built around one culture starts to fracture as it crosses borders. The traditional answer is to hire locally in every market, which is expensive and slow. The alternative, leaving it to already-stretched localisation teams buried in spreadsheets, isn't much better.
"Localisation teams don't have the capacity to grow," Minh explained. "They're living in Excel. I want to free them from the boring work so they can focus on being creative."
Hyperlocalise's AI agents take marketing, product and business content in one language and adapt them to another, preserving cultural nuance, maintaining brand consistency, and outputting directly into the tools teams already use: Canva, PDF, Photoshop.
Minh came to the idea from both personal and professional experience. Multilingual and having navigated his own cultural transition to Australia, he knows firsthand what gets lost when meaning crosses a border. The idea crystallised in early 2024 through conversations with friends in the localisation community who kept describing the same gap. The tools didn't exist, so he started building.
He'd known about Startmate since 2013, and when the moment felt right he joined Launch Club last year with a different idea. The program gave him structure, pacing, and investor readiness. Through building and localising that product, the need for a tool like Hyperlocalise became clearer.
For other founders sitting on the fence, his advice is simple. "You don't know what you don't know," he said. "So just do it."
The traction is real. Sixty to seventy percent of the waitlist is coming from the US, Israel, and Europe, international interest before the product has even formally launched. Minh is running pilots, seeking a co-founder, and pursuing funding. His long-term vision is to be the go-to platform for globalisation business intelligence, helping companies understand not just language but legal, cultural and market context for any new market they enter.
But beyond the enterprise use cases, one unexpected example has stayed with him. Students translating homework so their migrant parents can help them learn. "That's what keeps me going," he said. "Breaking the language barrier, breaking the cultural barrier. Giving everyone that equal opportunity."
Minh is closing a gap that has long been a problem. Speaking everyone's language, no matter where you are, so brands can communicate in a way that feels authentic and real.
Follow Minh and learn more about Hyperlocalise here.
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