Artificial Intelligence Transcription technology company Verbit has raised an estimated $65 million to boost its brand. The latest series B funding round, totaling $31 million, was led by New York City-based growth equity firm Stripes.
Existing investors Viola Ventures, Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital and ClalTech are also participating.
Verbit will use this latest investment to further accelerate the company’s rapid growth, including expanding to new industry verticals, adding coverage of new languages, and continually innovating its speech recognition technology to make Verbit the best-in-class solution for all transcription and captioning. This news comes on the heels of the release of Verbit’s Real-Time transcription solution and the opening of its first U.S. office in New York, which is expected to triple in headcount in 2020.
“We are extremely proud to have been able to turn Verbit into one of the market-leading companies in our industry 3 years after its inception”. said Tom Livne, CEO and co-founder of Verbit. “This latest financing round is an important milestone in Verbit’s journey and strengthens the incredible momentum we had in 2019. The collaboration with Stripes is a great indicator of Verbit’s category-leading product and will allow us to continue innovating in the market.”
The fast growth of the Israeli technology market is demonstrated by the large volume of investments in Israel-based tech companies, which raised a record of $8.19 billion in 2019, easily surpassing the $6.4 billion raised in 2018, which itself was a record. Stripes, formerly known as Stripes Group, is investing in Verbit as its second Israeli investment after leading monday.com’s Series C and is actively looking to deploy more capital in the region.
“We are thrilled to partner with Tom and the rest of the Verbit team on their mission to build the leading AI-powered transcription and captioning platform,” said Saagar Kulkarni, Stripes’ partner who will join Verbit’s board of directors. “We are big believers in the power of AI to fundamentally change business models and provide critical services better, faster, and more affordably. Verbit has already demonstrated incredible value to its customers across many verticals, and we believe they are just getting started in transforming this $30 billion market.”
More than 150 customers in the legal and higher education industries, including Harvard, Stanford and Coursera, utilize Verbit’s in-house, AI-enabled speech recognition technology. Verbit’s voice technology can target 90% accuracy, and in order to get closer to 99% accuracy, the product incorporates a network of fifteen thousand human transcribers to correct errors and make any necessary revisions. These edits then flow back into the self-learning AI models, which work to improve Verbit’s machine learning algorithms over time.
“We chose Verbit because of the superior accuracy, turnaround time and cost they offered,” said George Michaels, Executive Director of Instructional Development & Interim Assistant Dean at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s been a definite game-changer for us.”
To learn more about Verbit, please visit: Verbit.ai.
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