prabhuLondon-based automated transcription and editing platform, Trint, has raised £3.44m in a Series A funding round.
The company, which counts some of the world’s largest media organisations — including The Associated Press, Vice News, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel — among its enterprise clients, said the money raised will be used to enhance the AI powered platform.
The new round is led by a follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures. Institutional investors include TechNexus, a venture collaborative of entrepreneurs, engineers, and business leaders; and The Associated Press.
The company has raised a total of £5.96 million since it was founded in December 2014.
CEO and founder Jeff Kofman was inspired to build Trint after spending 30 years as an Emmy Award-winning war correspondent and foreign correspondent with ABC and CBS News, during which time he estimates he manually transcribed thousands of hours of interviews.
AI-powered platform
Trint said it would use the funding to enhance its AI-powered platform so that customers can extract even more value from recorded audio and video and unlock the emerging voice economy.
In the coming months, Trint will also launch a new suite of collaboration features that will transform workflows for large teams working with audio and video content and enhance their ability to work together on editing transcripts and publishing content.
The firm will also be releasing a new tool that combines a video player with an interactive transcript, making recorded content searchable, discoverable, and shareable on the Internet.
“In the last century, the world communicated through text; in the 21st-century communication is driven by voice and the spoken word,” said Kofman. “We’ve created Trint to go far beyond automated transcription, building the world’s first enterprise product for managing the workflow of the spoken word: letting users take raw recorded content, find the moments that matter and collaborate with others to produce content faster and more efficiently.”
He added: “Trint is focused on serving the needs of video production, brands, news organizations, and researchers, allowing them to unlock the value of the spoken word like never before.”
“TechNexus joined the round as both an investor and collaborator with enterprise partners, such as Shure Inc., committed to pilot and develop Trint’s technology into new industry and market solutions,” said JJ Oslund, Senior Manager, Technexus Ventures.
Kofman also noted that Trint is one of a growing number of technology companies that have opted to bypass funding from venture capitalist firms to maintain focus on smart and steady growth and the development of the core product.
Since its 2016 launch, London-based Trint has grown from four to 45 employees, including seven employees in the company’s North American headquarters in Toronto. It has seen consistent double-digit growth in revenue since 2017 and is now used by more than a quarter million customers. It has been hailed as “by far the best automated transcription service” by The New York Times and an “unprecedented voice transcription technology” by Wired.
Trint initially launched with funding from the Knight Enterprise Fund, as well as early support from BBC Worldwide Labs and Cisco. In June 2017, the company raised £2.4 million in funding.
In July 2018, Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund awarded Trint a grant of £260,000 to build an automated translation project in 100+ languages which is now in development.
In 2018 Trint was awarded the “Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism.”
