User:Felixmilshtein/Verbit Company

Verbit Software Ltd., known as the Verbit Company, is an international private company with headquarters in Israel. Verbit uses its in-house AI to produce software and solutions for transcription, i.e. automatic conversion of speech into text, with the help of professional human transcribers.

The Verbit Company was founded in March 2017 by Tom Livne, who serves as the company's CEO, Dr. Eric Shelef (who was CTO and later ceased to be active in the company) and Kobi Ben Zvi (who was VP of Engineering and later ceased to be active in the company). [1] [2] The company developed AI in-house which is used to generate automatic transcriptions, captions, translations and other solutions, with the editing of human transcribers.

The company's software receives a sound file as input and transcribes it automatically.

Another service receives a video file as input, and attaches captions or subtitles to it automatically. A third service is transcription of real-time speech. In all three cases, the product of the automatic process is accurate, but is passed on to a highly-trained human transcriber to edit the work and reach the accuracy levels needed by legal guidelines, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The improved result is fed into the system, allowing it to be improved through machine learning. Verbit produces transcripts and captions in English and Spanish, as well as offers translation into many other languages. The company services the education, corporate, media, legal, government, non-profit, cultural institution and finance sectors. The company's headquarters are located in Givatayim, Israel, with additional offices in New York, San Francisco and Kyiv. As of May 2022, the company employs 570 employees, 200 of them in Israel. In addition, the company employs 35,000 freelance transcribers from 120 countries, whose job is to edit its automatic transcripts and captioning files.

Verbit’s mission is to make content and experiences more accessible to individuals with disabilities, as well as more engaging to everyone. Verbit works with 2,000+ leading universities and businesses, including Stanford University, Virginia Tech, FOX, BBC, Kaltura, CNBC and many others.

In May 2021, the company acquired the American company VITAC, [3] which offers live captions for broadcast networks and corporations and creates subtitles for films. [4] In the past year, Verbit has also acquired Automatic Sync Technologies (AST), Take Note and U.S. Captioning Company.

Verbit is valued at $2B. Initially, the company raised $11 million. In January 2019, the company raised $23 million. [1] In January 2020, the company raised $31 million. [5] In November 2020, the company raised $60 million. [6] In June 2021, the company raised $157 million and became a unicorn company. [7] In November 2021, the company raised $150 million, and in addition existing shareholders (employees and investors) sold shares worth $100 million. [8]