Venture Capital Firms

Angel Round of $600,000 for Start Up SpeakerText

SpeakerText, a start up based in San Francisco, CA, founded in 2008, announced that it has raised $600,000 in an angel round. The funding was led by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and a successful entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and activist. Also, Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups and Startup2Startup, Lukas Biewald, the Crowdflower Chief Executive Officer, Chris Yeh, Roy Rodenstein and Georges Harik, the director of Googlettes. The company will use the funding to hire new staff and to expand its San Francisco team. SpeakerText has plans to double the number of its full time employees within the first semester of 2011. The money received is a big success for SpeakerText, that provides a service that copies videos and enables publishers to link the transcripts to the video players through a menu.

Adding the video transcripts key advantage is the improved SEO that allows publishers’ videos more easily to be found and viewed through the search engines. The company also offers publishers the possibility to share parts of videos and transcripts through the services of social networking like Facebook and Twitter. The company has integrated the technology to work with Ooyala, Brightcove, YouTube, Blip.tv and WordPress video players. It is also available within the self publishing platforms like Long Tail Video’s JW Player. SpeakerText has released an API for the third parties to be able to plug into the system.

SpeakerText works with through the use of a combination of both computers and humans, due to the fact that computers cannot reproduce the human voice too well, computers’ algorithms transcribe the most part of the text and then humans resolve the kinks, are able to transcribe things that computers are not able to.

SpeakerText has a $2 fee for a minute of transcription and a monthly fee if users exceed an usage limit. The company is very promising, being able to help solving a valid problem that many companies face.

The start up company that was originally founded in New York followed a move across the country, moving its headquarters to San Francisco. The move was made in order for SpeakerText to be closer to its investors and the Silicon Valley talent that it wanted to attract since it was relocated.

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