Israeli AI-powered transcription platform Verbit has announced the acquisition of VITAC, the largest North American provider of TV captioning products and solutions. Verbit is buying Colorado-based VITAC from private equity investor Gorews for an estimated tens of millions of dollars. Verbit says the acquisition will position it, "as the number one player in the professional transcription and captioning market across legal, media, education, government and corporate sectors."
Verbit founder and CEO Tom Livne said, "I thought about buying VITAC a year after Verbit was founded but people thought I was crazy because were an early stage company. We've known this company for a long time and it closes a circle from my point of view."
He added, "We are thrilled to further strengthen our position as the market leader in the transcription and captioning industry in partnership with VITAC. This opportunity allows us to expand our offerings for the media vertical and provide advanced transcription capabilities to our current education, legal, and corporate customers. The combined company will harness decades of transcription and captioning expertise to offer customers a best-in-class solution based on our proven technology. We will continue to invest in our platform, top talent, and domain expertise to evolve and develop our solutions to meet our customers' dynamic needs."
Verbit was founded in 2017 by Livne, Eric Shellef and Kobi Ben Tzvi and has 170 employees and a pool of 30,000 freelance transcribers. The company has developed a platform with AI-based algorithms for producing automatic transcripts with 90% accuracy, which are then corrected by human transcribers. Verbit has raised $122 million since it was founded.
VITAC established 35 years ago has captioning expertise with clients that include every broadcast company, most cable networks, program producers, corporations, educational institutions, and government agencies - Verbit can now offer a broader portfolio of solutions.
With the largest transcription workforce in the industry, Verbit will drive forward its mission to make all video and audio content accessible to everyone through its high quality captioning and transcription capabilities.
VITAC CEO Chris Cowell said, "We're delighted to join the Verbit family and bolster their leading position in the transcription industry globally. 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."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 12, 2021
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