Palo Alto-headquartered AI-powered transcription platform Verbit has acquired VITAC – the largest provider of captioning products and solutions by market share in North America. The acquisition means that Verbit is the number one player in the professional transcription and captioning market across legal, media, education, government and corporate sectors.
The acquisition follows Verbit’s $60m fundraise towards the end of 2020, which CEO Tom Livne said at the time was earmarked in part for merger and acquisition opportunities, as Verbit pursues new verticals and expands the number of languages its platform supports.
Within the legal sector Verbit – which offers a tech-plus-human approach – provides real time deposition transcriptions and with VITAC’s 35 years of captioning expertise, Verbit says it can now offer a deeper portfolio of solutions.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Livne said: “The benefits depend on the vertical but in general it will mean new offerings, for example audio descriptions that we didn’t have in the past. They also have French – we were focusing on English but they have different languages. If you take all this together and the fact that we have customers like CNN and Fox, it puts us in a unique position to keep leading the market and execute on our strategy.”
That strategy is to become a public company and Livne says: “We’re only four years old but we’re building out our long term plan as to how we can be in six to seven years a billion dollar company. We’re already on that trajectory and thinking of our future as a public company.”
One development is that Verbit’s experts are now trained according to their vertical in a more targeted way. Further developments will include established integrations with video cloud platforms, and support to translate transcription into different languages.
In a statement out today (11 May), Livne said: “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.”
Watch our video interview with Livne, in which he discusses the Series C and Verbit’s growth plans HERE