Tel Aviv transcription platform Verbit gets $60 million to keep up with demand for video captions

Verbit, an AI-powered transcription and captioning platform, has closed a $60 million Series C round led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures, Stripes, HV Ventures and ClalTech, as well as new investor Vertex Growth. The Israeli company, which has raised over $100 million to date, says its revenue run rate has grown five-fold since 2019. This latest round comes about 10 months after a $31 million Series B. With all the fresh capital, Verbit will focus on product development (including adding more languages to the platform) and move into M&A territory. With the shift to remote working and learning, the startup believes there’s a growing — and likely permanent — expectation that every video comes with captions and transcriptions. That goes for media and entertainment, too.

While Verbit currently serves over 400 enterprise-grade customers in the legal and higher-education industries, it would like to unlock some of these other verticals as well.  Its digital transcription service is a hybrid-model of artificial Intelligence (specifically machine learning and natural language processing) and a network of 22,000 human transcribers. The result is “99.9% accuracy” and turnaround deliveries that are ten-times faster than the industry standard, the company claims. Founded in 2016, the company has offices in Tel Aviv, Kyiv and New York City.

Photo: Some of the Verbit team, from the company website