Trint, a London-based transcription service co-founded by award winning journalist Jeff Kofman, has raised $3.1m in a pre-Series A round led by Horizon Labs.
Horizon Lab’s – the Hong Kong-based Seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures – investment was led by Bart Swanson, a serial technology entrepreneur; Andy Prozes, former global CEO of LexisNexis; Mark Opzoomer, co-founder of Bond Capital Partners and former regional vice president of Yahoo Europe.
Belgian investors Lorenz Bogaert and Toon Coppens, founders of the social discovery sites Netlog and Twoo, also participated.
“As someone who has spent thousands of hours of my life transcribing interviews, I know first-hand how Trint will completely transform not just news production but dozens of fields that rely on transcription – from marketing and medicine to academia and law,” said Kofman.
“We are thrilled to have the backing of a stellar group of investors who share our vision for making manual transcription a thing of the past.”
The firm seeks to automate transcription by leveraging machine learning and speech-to-text tech.
Launched in September last year, Trint previously received investment from the Knight Enterprise Fund and Google Digital News Initiative. It was also supported by the BBC Worldwide Labs and Cisco.
The company claims to have approximately 7,000 regular users and says the new funds will be used to support further technical development with the aim of creating a comprehensive end-to-end publishing platform.
Trint also has plans to launch a mobile app and various enterprise solutions in order to onboard media organisations, universities and government agencies as potential customers.
The firm is also expected to office an office in North America later this year.