Israeli AI Transcription Startup Verbit Becomes Unicorn With $157M Series D Raise
Verbit today announced the completion of its US$157 million Series D round. CEO Tom Livne noted that the latest round of funding brings the post-money market cap to more than US$1 billion, and the funding will be used by Verbit as it prepares for his IPO. It is said that it supports the expansion of the market.
The market for speech and voice recognition technology is expected to be worth US$31.82 billion by 2025, driven by new applications in industries such as banking, healthcare and automotive. In fact, it is said that one in five people in the United States use smart speakers on a daily basis, and it is said that recently more than 30% of Google searches are performed by voice.
Livne, who co-founded Verbit.ai with Eric Shellef and Kobi Ben Tzvi in 2017, affirms that the New York-based startup will contribute significantly to the rise of the voice transcription space.
Livne said in a press release:
The transcription market is ripe for innovation. That's the reason I founded Verbit in the first place. Verbit has already experienced rapid development, largely driven by the shift to remote work and accelerated digitization due to the pandemic.
This new funding is another milestone in our approach to becoming a publicly traded company, and will further support our expansion through strategic acquisitions and investments.
Long-established companies like Nuance, Cisco, Otter, Voicera, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have been competing for years, including enterprise platforms like Microsoft 365 Verbit's adaptive voice transcription captioning service is nothing new. Verbit's adaptive speech recognition technology, however, says it can transcribe with over 99.9% accuracy.
Verbit customers first upload audio and video files to their dashboard for processing by AI. The material is then edited and reviewed by over 33,000 freelancers in over 120 countries, taking into account notes and guidelines provided by clients. Completed Verbit transcripts can be exported to Blackboard, Vimeo, YouTube, Canvas, BrightCode, and more. The web front end displays job progress and allows users to edit and share files, set permissions for each file, add inline comments, request reviews, view usage reports, and more.
Customers must make a minimum commitment of US$10,000, but this pricing clearly pays dividends. Despite pandemic-related headwinds, annual recurring revenue has grown six-fold since 2020 and is now close to US$100 million, Livne said.
Verbit's portfolio of products supports the healthy growth of over 400 educational and commercial customers (up from 70 as of January 2019), including Harvard University, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), London Business School and Stanford University. We have a customer base. His Verbit, which recently acquired captioning provider VITAC, supports more than 1,500 customers in the legal, media, education, government, and corporate sectors, and is the "No .1 player”. Customers include CNBC, CNN and Fox.
Verbit plans to add 200 new business and product representatives in the coming years to expand into areas such as insurance, finance, media and healthcare. To that end, we have recently developed a “Human in the Loop” approach for media companies that requires only a few seconds of latency to make certain decisions and controls in machines and systems that have become more automated and autonomous through artificial intelligence and other means. Dare to intervene human beings.)" transcription service. It also signed an agreement with the non-profit Speech to Text Institute to start investing in court report and legal transcription technology.
Verbit's Series C Round Led by Sapphire Ventures, with Participation from Existing Investors Stripes, Vertex Ventures, HV Capital, Oryzn Capital and CalTech, as well as Third Point, More Capital, Lion Investment Partners and ICON Fund Was. Following a US$60 million Series C round in November 2020, this round brings the company's total funding to over US$250 million in its fourth year of existence.
[via VentureBeat] @VentureBeat
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