Transcription Startup Verbit Valued at $2B Following Series E

The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered transcription startup Verbit is looking to expand its workforce after raising $250 million in a Series E round that values the company at $2 billion.

As the company announced on Tuesday (Nov. 23), the round — led by Third Point Ventures, along with participation from Sapphire Ventures, More Capital, Disruptive AI, Vertex Growth, 40North, Samsung Next and TCP — brings Verbit’s total funding to $550 million.

In addition to adding to its workforce, Verbit also plans to use the funding to support product research and development, pursue further mergers and acquisitions, and “provide enhanced value” to its clients, CEO Tom Livne said.

Verbit is operating in a space that already includes established companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The company claims that its adaptive speech recognition tech can generate transcription with more accuracy than its competitors.

Users upload audio or video to a dashboard for AI-powered processing. From there, a team edits and reviews the transcription, using the customer’s own notes and guidelines. Customers can then export the final transcriptions to services such as Blackboard, YouTube and Vimeo.

VentureBeat noted that businesses have upped their use of voice technologies during the pandemic, with around two-thirds of companies reporting that they have a voice technology strategy. The voice recognition market is poised to be worth $22 billion by next year.

Read more: Voice Assistants Give Banks a Powerful Digital Channel to Improve Customer Experience

Meanwhile, PYMNTS research shows that ownership of voice-activated speakers is about 31% of the population, skewing a bit higher for younger folks.

And in banking, home assistants and voice interactions have become a crucial enabler of new products and services, Doug Brown, president of NCR Digital Banking, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster on Tuesday (Nov. 23).

Brown said there is still a wealth of potential when it comes to the ways these devices can transform finance. He predicts that as banks explore this potential, there will be a rise in “telebanks,” which put together digital, visual and spoken cues to help consumers be more informed about their finances. To reach that point, Brown said banks do not need to be digital-first, but rather “digital-everywhere.”