It started with an interpreter feed that could not keep up, in a church in Denmark, on 11 August 2024. Seven weeks later, on the afternoon of 3 October 2024, the first line of code was written, and the project already had a name: Mulingai. From our journal, published the day our site opened.
From our journal. We kept notes from the very first days, long before there was a website to put them on. We published them on 24 September 2025, the day mulingai.com opened for early access. The dates in this post are the days things actually happened.
It began on a Sunday, 11 August 2024, during an ordinary worship service in a church in Denmark, when David's wife could not follow the translation and switched it off. That morning, the idea of MulingStream was born. The whole story is in how Mulingai started.
The question that followed was simple: what if every listener could hear the whole message, clearly and live, in their own language, on the phone already in their pocket?
On Thursday 3 October 2024, at a quarter past three in the afternoon, the first line of code was written. It set up an empty project with a place for a server, a website and a phone app, and almost nothing else. Even the page title still said what every new project says before anybody changes it.
The project had a name from that first afternoon: Mulingai. It was the name of the code before it was the name of a company.
The same evening, a little after ten, the first piece that actually did something arrived: a simple recorder that captured a speaker's voice. Everything since has grown out of that recorder. Before you can translate a sermon live, you have to hear it.
Before you can translate a sermon live, you have to hear it.
On 7 October 2024 the server side began. Its very first notes were already about churches: which languages a congregation needs, and how a translation should be set up for a service. It is a little moving to read those notes now, because nothing about the direction has changed since.
On 12 October 2024 the live translation part got the name it still carries. In the first days it had working names, a stream for languages and a little app for speaking, and that Saturday they were renamed. The live translation became MulingStream: Mulingai's way of streaming one speaker's words to every listener, each in their own language.
The rest of that autumn was evenings and weekends. Between October and December 2024 more than four hundred changes went into the code, most of them small, many of them thrown away again, all of them before there was a company, a customer or a website.
We kept these notes because we hoped one day there would be people who wanted to know where this started. On the day the site opened we decided they should be the first thing we published, so that anyone reading about Mulingai could see it did not begin with a business plan. It began in a church, with a feed that could not keep up, and a decision to do something about it.
The story continues in how Mulingai became a company, and in why we are called Mulingai, and why a flame.
Meet the team that grew out of those first evenings.