Verbit laying off dozens of employees

After replacing its CEO Tom Livne with Yair Amsterdam, Israeli captioning and transcription solutions company Verbit began laying off dozens of employees today including 20 in Israel. The company has 500 employees including 120 in Israel. Sources believe that the layoffs in Israel are related to activities involving the company’s human transcription activities.

Verbit provides transcription services based on special translation algorithms and an army of tens of thousands of transcribers assisting it and challenged in recent years by AI technology which has already caused a huge upheaval in the market.

Former founder and CEO Livne told “Globes” earlier this year that, “The transcription market which was completely manual until several years ago will no longer be worth $30 billion but smaller. But whoever holds the most suitable technology will triumph. So perhaps we will see erosion in growth in profitability in the short term but I am convinced that in the long-term things will look different.”

Livne added, “The market is changing before our eyes. Verbit has 3,000 customers. At the time I said that the company was expected to cross the $100 million mark in revenue, but our business model basically determines the amount of minutes we transcribe as twice the price per minute, and as soon as there is more automation and more AI the price will erode. But we are reinventing ourselves now. All transcription processes today are in the world of AI, and what changes is who has the data and we are sitting on a unique approach to the data.”

Verbit recently launched an AI-based transcription product for the legal world. The system summarizes affidavits, rulings and petitions, divides them into types of content, marks the important points, compares with laws and precedents and enables searching.

Livne remains the company’s chairman and owns 10% of Verbit’s shares, but does not hold an active position in the company. He will join the venture capital fund Oryzn Capital, which was the first investor in Verbit.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on March 5, 2024.

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