Verbit, an AI-powered transcription and captioning platform, has recently closed a USD 250m Series E funding round, bringing its total funding to USD 400m and its post-money valuation to USD 2 billion. This news has sent shockwaves throughout the language industry.
Verbit’s unique AI-powered platform is allowing businesses and organisations to quickly and accurately transcribe large amounts of data from audio and video files. So let’s explore this latest funding round and what it means for the language industry.
Verbit Stuns Language Industry With USD 250m Series E; Startup Valued at USD 2 Billion
Verbit, a startup in the language technology sector, recently announced its successful completion of a Series E funding round, raising USD 250 million and propelling the company’s valuation to an estimated USD 2 billion.
Founded in 2016 with a mission to bridge the gap between available knowledge and people worldwide by transforming how content is read, understood and used by providing smarter tech-based solutions to language processing challenges, Verbit has made tremendous strides towards achieving this goal.
Underpinned by AI-driven automation capabilities, Verbit offers intelligent captioning, transcription and translation services for businesses across multiple industries. As such, Verbit helps customers in sectors such as e-learning, legal services and media & publishing quickly and cost-effectively convert their audio/video content into multilingual formats.
Leveraging a globally distributed workforce of over 500 thousand human workers and cutting-edge technologies such as speech recognition algorithms for audio/video processing and natural language processing for translation services, Verbit is geared towards rapidly expanding its services around the world.
Series E funding round
Verbit, an AI-powered transcription and captions service provider founded in 2018, announced it has raised USD 250 million in Series E funding, bringing its total valuation to USD 2 billion. Tiger Global led the round with participation from Sapphire Ventures. This latest round of funding follows the USD 118 million Series D funding round closed in March 2021.
The past 12 months have been transformational for Verbit as the investment was used to accelerate product development while building a solid customer base across industries, including Education, Media & Entertainment and Legal. The additional funds raised will help continue this exponential growth and expand Verbit’s global presence through increased research and development investments.
Further investment will be directed towards building new products and services that reduce time to market for new customers with integrated captioning services, automated transcript generation capabilities, multilingual solutions utilising AI-driven language processing algorithms. Verbit is also investing in its suite of compliance offerings to ensure customers adhere to security guidelines mandated by law or institution policies throughout their digital properties and communications related activities.
Industry Reaction
The language industry has been stunned by news of Verbit’s USD 250 million Series E funding round, and consequent USD 2 billion valuation. This represents a huge milestone for the startup and the industry.
Here, we explore some of the reactions from industry professionals.
Industry experts’ reactions to the news
The news of Verbit’s USD 250 million Series E round, valuing the company at USD 2 billion and making it one of the world’s most valuable language startups, sent shockwaves through the industry and prompted a flurry of reactions from experts.
Leaders and experts in language technology lauded Verbit as a model for success, noting that its success speaks volumes about the growth potential in language processing. Kriti Sharma, cofounder and CEO of AI consultancy Agara Labs said of the news: “Verbit’s success is indicative of how much untapped potential remains in automated transcription and [language] services […] The fact that such investments are being made into companies supporting this sector is a testament to its rapid growth.”
Dr Pushpak Bhattacharyya, founder-director of IIT Bombay’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) also weighed in on Verbit’s latest funding round, saying “Verbit has managed to raise such a significant amount despite having to operate in an industry fraught with challenges. [It] could help spur venture capitalists to explore similar entities from India with great potential and realistic prospects.”
As investors and entrepreneurs alike looked to capitalise on advances in language technologies driven by machine learning applications like those utilised by Verbit, Frank Chen, Partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz added his voice to those cheering on the startup’s progress: “This milestone marks an inflection point for both [Verbit] and our industry as a whole — proof that you can build category-defining companies through deep technology innovation.”
Impact on the language industry
The impressive Series E funding of Verbit — a transcription and captioning platform startup — has shocked the language industry as the USD 250m round valued Verbit at USD 2 billion. At the same time, it was only last year that its Series D round had valued the company at USD 500 million.
This groundbreaking development gives the language industry reason to pause and consider the potential of advanced technology for changing the way business is conducted. Verbit’s automated transcription service powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) streamlines processes for organisations worldwide, reducing costs and boosting efficiencies.
Verbit’s cutting-edge solution has enabled organisations to monetize their content in ways never before possible, such as providing closed captions/subtitles and translating transcripts into multiple languages in near real-time. This kind of workflow automation not only supports accessibility underpinnings, but also offers unparalleled cost savings to traditional services like manual audio or video transcription.
The language industry has witnessed reduced turnaround times due to AI-driven automation. Verbit’s remarkable success indicates that this shift could become more entrenched in coming years. Automation will continue to transform content creation and localization processes — ushering in a new era of innovation and encouraging further experimentation with groundbreaking technology such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) or automated translation pipelines.
Verbit’s Growth
Verbit’s impressive growth is nothing short of astonishing. After closing its Series E funding round with a whopping USD 250 million, Verbit is now valued at USD 2 billion.
The funding round marks the startup’s expansion into the language industry and massive success in just a few years. But, first, let’s look into the details of Verbit’s growth.
Overview of Verbit’s growth trajectory
Verbit, a startup focused on advancing the language industry, has recently completed their Series E funding round. This round raised $250 million, valuing Verbit at $2 billion in the valuation market. This achievement has stunned the industry and marks a major milestone for Verbit.
Verbit’s journey began when its founders set out to simplify the transcription and captioning process for various applications in education, video streaming, customer support, legal, etc. Since commencing operations in 2018, Verbit quickly demonstrated strong potential for capturing market share in translated services.
Verbit’s rapid growth over the past two years can be attributed to its innovative technology-enabled platform which automatically generates accurate transcripts with human-level accuracy levels within minutes. This area used to take days or weeks of manual labour by teams of people. This workflow enabled end users to easily collaborate and monitor the status of their documents directly through the platform instead of relying on disparate third party vendors for completing simple tasks like transcriptions or translations with minimal user input needed when combined with AI algorithms trained to recognize specific content types such as audio/video files or text documents/articles.
In addition to its superior technology, Verbit’s unique approach towards addressing various market needs have enabled them to continue growing despite tough competition from other startups in similar fields. Their customer base ranges from Fortune 500 companies such as Walmart, Lyft and Microsoft; SMBs such as BetterHelp; learning institutions such as EM Lycee International; HR tech companies such as Phenom People; all leading to strong revenue figures reported year over year.
The influx of new funds will further accelerate harnessing AI capabilities while expanding globally into new markets and product areas. The funds will also be used for research & development investments which are already proving promising results due deployment of natural language processing [NLP] powered solutions that automatically detect context preferences enabling users align transcripts according HTML 5 standards by automatically picking up sentence patterns key words allowing structured data mining processes uncover potential golden nuggets content within audio/video recordings resulting higher rates accuracy machine generated transcripts than ever before. Hence this significant achievement for verBit will serve future potential customers throughout their journey embrace machine powered workflows and strengthen solidifying dominance enterprise grade translation services – VerBit already holds nearly 42% of US Market share enterprise grade translation services estimated to reach 50% 2024.
List of investors
Israeli AI startup Verbit recently secured $250 million in a Series E round of funding, bringing its total valuation to $2 billion. This latest funding round, one of the largest ever in the language industry, was led by investment giant Tiger Global and included participation from several other investors.
Participating investors in Verbit’s Series E round include Tiger Global Management; Viola Growth; Mubadala Capital; DTCP (Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners); Cornerstone Venture Partners; SoftBank Investment Advisers; Ibex Investors; Emerge Education LLC and existing investors Blake Investment Partners, Flint Capital and HV Ventures.
The investment marks an endorsement of the success of Verbit’s automated transcription solution, which customers are utilising from more than 50 countries across six continents. With scalable solutions for enterprise groups, law firms and educational institutions, Verbit’s platform increases accuracy and reduces transcription time for enhanced customer experience. The company also launched its translation offering to add value to its customers this past year.
Verbit plans to use the proceeds of this fundraising round for ongoing product innovation and international expansion as part of its mission to fulfil digital transformation needs for their customers worldwide.
Verbit’s Future
Verbit, a transcription and captioning AI startup, has raised a massive USD 250 million in its Series E funding round. This brings the total fundraising of Verbit to an impressive USD 410 million, and the company is now valued at USD 2 billion.
This latest funding round will have a major impact on the language industry. So let’s look at how Verbit’s latest success might shape its future.
Plans for the future
Verbit, the language technology company, has made waves in the language industry and created a buzz in the tech space after its latest Series E fundraising round. The startup has reportedly raised USD 250 million for a valuation of USD 2 billion – making it one of the most successful startups in recent times.
Verbit plans to use this investment to expand its AI-assisted transcription and captioning services for audio and video content. Verbit saw tremendous success last year with increased demand for remote work trends. This year, Verbit looks forward to strengthening its presence as a leader in LanguageTech, growing its engineering and product development capabilities, and widening its customer support offering – to provide companies with seamless access to language tools that deliver real business results.
The company plans to support the expansion of their product suite by investing further in research & development across employee diversity initiatives, content management systems (CMSs), extended use cases such as machine translation and natural language processing (NLP) needs. In addition, Verbit also works towards creating custom dashboards that give users full control over how they manage their content and measure outcomes against the same metrics. With this funding round, Verbit has become one of the most exciting startups set to continue driving innovations within the LanguageTech industry.
Impact of the Series E funding round on Verbit’s growth
Verbit’s latest USD 2 billion funding round comes after a USD 250 million Series E venture capital financing in 2020. This brings the total amount of investments or financing raised by the startup to over USD 350 million since its founding in 2019.
The current round of funding was secured by leading venture capitalists, including Y Combinator’s Samuel Altman, lool Ventures’ Orr Shalom, Viola Fintech’s Shlomi Ben-Haim, Lerer Hippeau’s Eric Hippeau and LightSpeed Venture Partners’ Riaz and Ravi Tambe. The fresh influx of funds will enable Verbit to accelerate its technological innovations and expand its operations globally.
Verbit’s unprecedented valuation of USD 2 billion is a testament to the company’s success as a language service provider and stands as a unique occasion for the entire language industry. Since its establishment, Verbit has seen tremendous growth with revenues having increased an estimated 18-fold in 2020 through strategic partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Pearson Education and 3M Global eCommerce.
The latest funding round marks a new era of growth for Verbit and provides immense opportunity for continued innovation in digital linguistics services across all languages. Equipped with this new capital infusion, the language service provider is now well-positioned to enter exciting new markets while dramatically expanding its offerings — establishing itself as an industry leader while continuing to drive value to customers globally.
tags = Multilingual transcription and captioning company, Verbit, Stuns Language Industry, planned IPO, verbit 250m 2b juneparktechcrunch, unicorn-making series D, CEO Tom Livne
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