Two big names in the transcription tech market are joining forces.
Verbit, a fast-growing startup offering AI-enabled transcription services, announced Tuesday it has acquired VITAC, a longtime leader in the space, for an undisclosed amount. The company says this deal positions it as the “number one player” in the transcription and captioning market across the legal, media, education, government and corporate industries.
Put simply, Verbit takes audio or video recordings and transcribes them into text, creating an automated draft that is about 90 percent accurate, according to the company. It also has a team of nearly 300,000 freelance transcribers that come in later to make corrections, which the software then learns from in order to improve on its next transcription.
To date, most of Verbit’s customers have been in the education, government and corporate sectors. Founder and CEO Tom Livne says the company had been wanting to expand into areas like healthcare and media when he learned VITAC was “looking for a new home.”
Meanwhile, VITAC has been around for more than 30 years and is considered to be the largest closed captioning company in the space, offering services like live and offline captioning, subtitling, audio description and encoding. It claims to work with every broadcast company, most cable networks and a variety of educational and government institutions.
All of VITAC’s capabilities will be folded into Verbit’s offerings in light of this acquisition. The newly combined company will also form a new client success team to expand its client services.
“We’re delighted to join the Verbit family and bolster their leading position in the transcription industry globally,” Chris Crowell, VITAC’s CEO, said in a statement provided to Built In. “We’ve been incredibly impressed with Verbit’s rapid growth and technology advantages, and together we look forward to serving more of this dynamic industry with clients across all vertical segments.”
Of course, Verbit isn’t the only tech-enabled transcription service out there. This announcement comes mere weeks after Microsoft bought Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications for nearly $20 billion — one of its largest acquisitions to date. Plus, just last March Otter.ai raised a $50 million Series B, and Livne considers Rev to be a “serious competitor.” However, he says Verbit is the world’s largest AI-powered transcription platform on the market today in terms of growth.
Indeed, Verbit has raised $125 million in just four years and has more than 170 employees at its NYC headquarters and offices around the world. Livne says the company plans to fill another 200 open positions across a variety of departments over the next year.
He also hinted that an IPO may be just around the corner.
“There is a $30 billion market opportunity out there,” Livne told Built In. “And it’s really ours to lose. We have all the right ingredients in place, we just need to keep executing on it.”
