From Salem to an international audience: LT profiles Monok
LT profiles Monok’s founders and explores how their technology produces journalism in 40 languages for publishers and businesses around the world.
From childhood programming projects in Salem to AI-generated journalism in 40 languages: Länstidningen has profiled Monok and our founders, Adam and Sam Sam. Published on November 8, 2023, Mattias Holgersson’s feature explores both the brothers’ background and how our technology serves publishers and businesses internationally.
A computer, a programming book and an early start
The story begins with a promise from their father: learn Visual Basic, and they could have a computer. Before tackling the programming manual, the brothers had to learn enough English to read it.
While still at school, they built voice-controlled software that attracted international attention. Robotics projects followed at S:ta Ragnhildsgymnasiet in Södertälje. In 2016, that shared interest in building technology became Monok.
From a topic to a finished article
LT describes how the idea behind Monok took inspiration from Omni’s news summaries, with the ambition of automating the production process. Rather than asking a writer to gather and rewrite coverage manually, the system starts with a customer’s chosen subject.
A topic such as football prompts it to find relevant reporting, videos and posts, then group the information by factors such as event, language or country. That material passes through several processing stages to produce an article with text, images and links.
Human review is part of the workflow described in the interview. Adam explains that Monok works with a provider in England supplying 50 journalists to check the articles before they reach publication.
News for publishers—and for businesses
The feature places Monok’s customers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Japan. It also gives a concrete example of why a business outside the media industry would buy news: companies selling electric-vehicle charging stations use regular coverage of electric cars to attract readers interested in their products.
That example connects publishing directly to content marketing. The subject is not chosen in isolation; it relates to the audience the business wants to reach. Regular, relevant articles give that audience a reason to visit beyond a product listing.
LT’s profile brings those two sides of Monok together: the technical work of automating article production and the practical reasons customers need content in the first place.