Verbit, a transcription startup with offices in Tel Aviv, New York and Kyiv has attracted $23 million in investment.
The money comes from six companies, with venture firm Viola Ventures as the lead investor. The startup will spend the funding on hiring more people, especially for its New York office, and extending its sales and marketing branch in the United States, its main market.
In total, the startup has already attracted $34 million since the start of its operations in 2016. The previous investment round took place in the spring of 2018, when the company received $11 million.
The company is considered Israeli for its founders, but it is headquarters in the United States and has had a research and development center in Ukraine since 2016. The Ukrainian office has tech people on staff who develop artificial intelligence software, as well as the startup’s human resource department, which hires translators.
Verbit currently has 70 people on staff across the three offices — about 20 of them are based in Kyiv — and hires “thousands of freelancers” across 20 countries.
Currently, Verbit’s artificial intelligence translates speech and creates transcripts with about 90 percent accuracy. Then, the startup’s fleet of freelancers sets to work on those automated transcripts to look for and fix mistakes. Verbit thus hires both software developers and translators. This approach, according to Verbit, promises greater speed and lower cost for transcribing.
The startup is focusing on the legal and academic sector, where today it is important to have subtitles for video lessons and lectures. Verbit works with famous online learning platform Coursera (used by Stanford and Harvard), U.S. telecommunications conglomerate Comcast, and the London Business School. Overall, it has 100 clients.
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