Transcription AI firm Verbit has achieved a valuation exceeding $2 billion after its latest funding round. The company finalized its Series E funding round of $250 million, driven by Third Point Ventures. This development comes only six months after it became a unicorn with $1 billion in valuation at juneparktechcrunch.
Verbit is growing rapidly in the transcription and captioning space estimated to be a $30 billion segment. Third Point Ventures has already invested in the company as part of the previous round, before scaling up its contribution this time to $200 million. Sapphire Ventures, which spearheaded the last round, joined other VCs in contributing the remaining amount in this one. Verbit has been on a capital raising spree since its launch in 2017. The new round takes total funding to $550 million, with $60 million being raised one year earlier.
The funds have been invested by Verbit in growing its business and technology development. They have also contributed to the recent acquisition of VITAC, the captioning technology brand. The CEO of the company, Tom Livne, has stated that this latest funding round is a testament to investor confidence in the company’s abilities to consolidate its market leadership while adding how the company developed a robust tech-driven platform that changed the entire space. He also highlighted the company’s blueprint to develop vertically-integrated AI solutions that are voice-based, bringing greater value for all customers and enhancing the accessibility of their businesses.
AI and humans are deployed for transcriptions at Verbit. The regular AI-speech framework is customizable on the basis of customer and domain requirements. Automated transcriptions are fine-tuned by humans for enabling accuracy levels of 99.9%. The higher education, media, and legal clientele of the company cover names like Harvard, CNN, and more. Verbit posted revenues of close to $100 million annually and has been growing handsomely with its network of 35,000 freelance transcribers and 600 professional captioners. The new funding round will help in upgrading company systems and broadening its customer networks, while enabling further acquisitions in the industry as well. It will also help the startup embark on preparations to list publicly in the near future.
Managing partner at Third Point Ventures, Robert Schwartz, has stated that Verbit offers the best combination of tech-driven inorganic and organic transcription marketplace growth. He has also talked about the rarity of coming across a predominantly fragmented yet massive market that is suitable for digital overhauling and consolidation alike. Verbit has already scaled up towards attaining market leadership in a shorter time span according to Schwartz. He also talked about how the investment firm is happy to scale up its investments in the company while looking to keep contributing to future growth and evolution.
