Major layoffs are being made at two additional Israeli unicorns. Verbit, an AI transcription and captioning company, is terminating 60 employees out of its 580 total employees, including several dozen in Israel. Bizzabo, an events solution platform, is terminating 120 employees, or 30% of its 400 total employees, including 35 in Israel.
Verbit and Bizzabo’s layoffs come quickly after other major layoff announcements. A video and image editing developer for mobile apps, Lightricks, announced on Sunday that it is laying off 80 employees, including 70 in Israel. Together, they make up 6 percent of the 1,700 people employed by the online trading platform eToro. This represents a reduction in personnel of 12%. Non-profit tech companies are revising their rapid growth strategies in response to the economic slowdown.
Verbit, which has raised $530 million since its founding, is putting the layoffs into effect as part of a significant strategic shift that also involves breaking the company up into business units that are each responsible for their own profits and losses.
Verbit is one of the more complex startups operating in Israel because its business model combines technology for human services with traditional software sales, creating a kind of “Uber” for transcribers. Verbit has acquired a number of transcription companies in order to dominate the market in numerous languages, which partially explains its astronomical growth over the previous six months.
Verbit provides transcription and captioning services to its more than 2,000 clients in the academic, legal, and media industries. Leading colleges and universities like Harvard, Stanford, Coursera, and the London School of Economics are among the clients of CNN and NBC. Approximately 98 percent of Verbit’s transcription work is done in English, and cofounder and CEO Tom Livne estimates that revenue will reach $100 million in 2021, which is six times what it was in 2020.
In 2017, Livne, Eric Shellef, and Kobi Ben-Tzvi founded Verbit. In the early years of the company, Shellef and Ben-Tzvi built its technical infrastructure; they later sold their ownership interests and ceased to be involved in its operations. Verbit has 520 employees in Israel, the Ukraine, and the US after the layoffs.
After making a quick pivot at the beginning of the Covid pandemic to adapt its platform for online conferences and then hybrid online and physical conferences, Bizzabo, which has developed software for organizing conferences and events, was selected as “Globes” startup of 2020. The largest reduction in staff made by an Israeli startup during the current downturn was the firing of 30% of its 400 employees.
Eran Ben-Shushan, co-founder and CEO of Bizzabo, said: “Since the company’s inception, this has been one of the toughest times we have faced. Although the choice was challenging, it was the best one for the shareholders, customers, and employees of Bizzabo.”
On July 6, 2022, Globes, Israel’s leading business news source, published the article in English.
