Verbit
Verbit is an artificial intelligence transcription and captioning company founded in 2017, with roots in Israel and a major presence in New York City, that provides transcription, captioning, audio description and related accessibility services to more than 3,000 customers in the legal, media, education, corporate and government sectors. Its platform combines proprietary automatic speech recognition with a large network of human transcribers who review and correct the machine output, a model designed to deliver accuracy at a speed and scale that purely manual services cannot match. Verbit grew with unusual speed: it raised more than 550 million dollars, passed a two billion dollar valuation in its 2021 Series E round, and consolidated the fragmented transcription industry by acquiring established companies including VITAC, the largest television captioning provider in North America, Automatic Sync Technologies, Take Note, Take 1 and US Captioning.
Founding and a Lawyer's Frustration
Verbit was founded in 2017 by Tom Livne, together with Eric Shellef and Kobi Ben Tzvi. Livne came from a legal career and, by his own account, founded the company out of dissatisfaction with the slow turnaround of transcription in legal work: as a lawyer he experienced the delays but lacked the tools to solve the problem himself, so he built a company around solving it. Shellef and Ben Tzvi were the technical co-founders who built the platform; both later left active roles at the company and sold their holdings, leaving Livne as the defining founder and, for its first years, chief executive.
The timing was deliberate. Automatic speech recognition had become good enough to produce a usable draft, often around ninety percent accurate in Verbit's early description, but not good enough for a court record, a university lecture or a television broadcast. Verbit's answer was a workflow in which artificial intelligence produced the transcript and professional human transcribers corrected it, with the company building a pool that reached some 30,000 freelance transcribers across many countries. That hybrid model, also used by American rivals, became the industry standard, and Verbit executed it with exceptional fundraising and acquisition energy.
Funding and Unicorn Status
Verbit raised capital at a rapid cadence. It received 11 million dollars in seed funding in 2018, a 23 million dollar Series A in January 2019 led by Viola Ventures, a 31 million dollar Series B in January 2020, and a 60 million dollar Series C in November 2020 led by Sapphire Ventures. In June 2021 it completed a 157 million dollar Series D led by Sapphire Ventures, at a valuation above one billion dollars, making it a unicorn; at that point total funding exceeded 250 million dollars including debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, revenue had grown sixfold in a year to nearly 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue, and the company employed about 350 people, including around 170 in Israel.
Less than six months later, in November 2021, Verbit closed a 250 million dollar Series E led by Third Point Ventures, valuing the company at two billion dollars and taking total funds raised to more than 550 million dollars. Livne said the capital would fund product development, geographical and vertical expansion and an intensified acquisition strategy, and discussed a future public listing as the company grew. The rounds reflected investor belief that transcription, a market Livne estimated at around thirty billion dollars but fragmented among many small firms, was ready for a consolidator, and that Verbit intended to be that consolidator, with more than a thousand acquisition targets in its pipeline, in his words at the time.
The Acquisition Strategy
Verbit's defining corporate story is its roll-up of respected specialist firms. Its landmark deal, completed in May 2021, was the acquisition of VITAC for fifty million dollars. VITAC, based in Colorado, was the largest provider of television captioning products and solutions in North America, known for captioning daily news, sports and events such as the Olympic Games and the Academy Awards. Livne said he had thought about buying VITAC a year after founding Verbit, when others considered the ambition unrealistic for so young a company. The deal positioned Verbit as a leading player in professional transcription and captioning across legal, media, education, government and corporate markets, and lifted its customer count above 1,500.
In December 2021 Verbit acquired Automatic Sync Technologies, a transcription and captioning provider focused on education and government. In March 2022 it bought Take Note, a British company founded in 2006 that provides transcription, captioning and note-taking for the market research sector, marking Verbit's entry into market research and expanding its European presence; Take Note's twenty-eight employees joined, its chief executive David Abbott stayed to lead it, and the acquisition took Verbit past 2,500 customers. The company then acquired US Captioning and Take 1, the latter a British-founded production services company dating to 1998 whose founder Dom Bourne and chief executive Louise Tapia presented the deal as a chance to extend services such as live captioning to media clients. By the company's own later count, Verbit had completed six acquisitions, each adding vertical expertise: media through VITAC and Take 1, education and government through Automatic Sync Technologies, and market research through Take Note.
Technology and How the Service Works
Verbit's platform offers word-for-word, interactive and collaborative transcripts and captions generated by its speech recognition technology and finished by professionals. The company later branded elements of this technology as Captivate, an artificial intelligence-powered system recognized when Verbit was named to Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech list, cited for accurate transcripts and captions, high availability, customizable solutions and integrations with multiple platforms. Verbit was also named to CNBC's list of top startups for the enterprise, with the citation noting its growth since 2017 and its portfolio of acquisitions.
The commercial logic of the technology is consistency across settings: a deposition, a lecture, a board meeting and a live broadcast all produce speech that clients need as reliable text, often under accessibility law or professional standards. By pairing its own speech recognition with specialist human teams inherited from acquired companies, Verbit could sell both automation and craft, and could promise customers in regulated or high-stakes environments that a person remained accountable for quality.
Customers and Verticals
Verbit's customers span the sectors where transcription is a necessity rather than a convenience. Legal clients need transcripts of depositions and proceedings. Media clients, including organizations named in company reporting such as CNBC, CNN and Fox, need captions that meet broadcast standards. Universities including Harvard and Stanford have been named among its education customers, and corporate and government clients use transcription and captioning for meetings, training and public content. After the Take Note acquisition the company served more than 2,500 customers, and by 2025 it reported serving more than 3,000 customers across education, legal, media, corporate and government.
The company describes its more recent role in the language of verbal intelligence: using artificial intelligence not only to capture everyday exchanges as text, but to help organizations interpret what was said and apply those insights in daily work. That framing moves Verbit beyond accessibility compliance toward knowledge management, while captioning and transcription remain its revenue foundation.
VITAC Rebrands as Verbit
A milestone in the consolidation came in March 2025, when VITAC rebranded as Verbit, unifying the group's best-known media captioning business under the parent brand. Verbit's chief executive by then was Yair Amsterdam, who described the rebrand as a pivotal step toward becoming a unified global leader in verbal intelligence and accessibility solutions, combining decades of captioning expertise with the group's artificial intelligence products. The company assured customers of uninterrupted service, with all existing and future VITAC projects proceeding as scheduled, while gaining access to more integrated artificial intelligence tools and expanded resources. The rebrand effectively closed the circle Livne had described in 2021: the startup that once dreamed of buying the captioning incumbent now traded under a single name, its own.
Leadership and Organization
Verbit's leadership story began with Livne, a lawyer turned founder who raised the capital, set the consolidation strategy and served as chief executive through the company's fastest growth. The later appointment of Yair Amsterdam as chief executive, and his public role in the 2025 VITAC rebrand, mark the company's transition from founder-led startup to a larger, group-structured business. Geographically, Verbit has described itself as based in Tel Aviv and New York, and this directory lists its United States base in New York City; its workforce, after the 2021 rounds, numbered in the hundreds of employees alongside tens of thousands of freelance transcribers in more than one hundred countries at the height of its expansion.
Position in the Industry
Verbit's significance in the media services industry is threefold. It proved that venture capital would fund transcription and captioning at software valuations, raising over half a billion dollars in four years. It demonstrated a consolidation playbook, buying heritage firms with trusted client relationships and re-platforming them on shared artificial intelligence. And it helped shift the industry's vocabulary from transcription as a clerical service to accessibility and verbal intelligence as strategic products. For broadcasters, universities, courts and companies facing rising volumes of audio and video, Verbit became one of the default enterprise answers, and its unification of the VITAC name under its own brand in 2025 signaled that the consolidator era it pioneered had matured.
