Verbit appoints Yair Amsterdam as permanent CEO, focuses on AI and growth
Verbit appoints Yair Amsterdam as permanent CEO, focuses on AI and growth
“We have growth plans and have reduced our cash burn rate, so we do not need to raise capital in the near future. We will consider raising capital only at the beginning of next year if the business plan shows results,” said Amsterdam, who served as Acting CEO since February following the departure of founder Tom Livne
Verbit has appointed Yair Amsterdam as a permanent CEO after he served as Acting CEO since February. Amsterdam replaced Tom Livne, the company's CEO since its inception and one of its founders, who still owns shares in the company. Verbit will hope that Amsterdam’s appointment ends a difficult period for the company, which included Livne's departure and a significant round of layoffs due to a major decrease in revenues, primarily caused by the impact of AI tools.
"We will transition all our customers from manual transcription to technology-based transcription and develop applications that go beyond transcription, providing business insights to users and moving higher up the value chain," Amsterdam told Calcalist.
"The company is adhering to its stated business plan, and we have no plans to lay off employees. We have growth plans and have reduced our cash burn rate, so we do not need to raise capital in the near future. We will consider raising capital only at the beginning of next year if the business plan shows results. Tom's departure was mainly a media shock, and the significant impact was the round of layoffs we went through. However, today we are recruiting employees and investing in our technological strategy.”
Amsterdam has over two decades of management experience and has served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) and President of Verbit. He previously served as Vice President of Global Procurement at Verint, Chief Operating Officer at Ex Libris and ProQuest, and is a member of the Glassbox board of directors.
Since assuming the role of interim CEO, Verbit has launched several technological innovations for its clients, including Captivate, Verbit's transcription technology, which provides precise solutions tailored to clients' specific needs; Legal Real-Time, which performs AI-based automatic transcription of legal discussions for attorneys across the U.S.; and a strategic partnership with ENCO, offering Verbit's media customers various options for hardware encoders and cloud captioning. Additionally, the company integrated Gen.VTM, an AI tool based on generative AI, allowing users to generate insights from text in real time.
The company, established in 2017, operates from offices in Israel, the USA, the UK, Ukraine, and Canada. Verbit has over 4,000 clients, including some of the largest organizations in the world in communication, technology, academia, and law, such as Fox, CNN, NBC, Harvard, Stanford, London Business School, Coursera, and Kaltura.
