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LONDON—December 1, 2020—Trint, the leading speech-to-text platform for content creation, today announced the close of its Series A Acceleration round with an investment of £5M (~$6.7M). The round, opened in August by The New York Times Company, closes with a £2M (~$2.6M) investment from Edge, the leading growth investor in the UK creative economy. Individual investors were also part of the round.
In 2019, Trint closed its Series A with £3.5M (~$4.6M) which included venture investments by The Associated Press and TechNexus. This new accelerated round brings the company’s total investment to £12M (~$16M). The Knight Foundation was an early investor in Trint.
“We are really excited to have The New York Times and Edge joining our investment team,” said Jeff Kofman, CEO and Founder of Trint and an Emmy-winning broadcast journalist and war correspondent. “Over the last year Trint has evolved from startup to scaleup and we know it’s critical to have professional investors helping us navigate through an exciting but complex high-growth phase. The breadth and depth of their expertise, as well as their networks in the sector, will really help us grow Trint in 2021 and beyond.”
Trint is now one of the UK’s fastest-growing startups, recently named in the Top Ten of the UK Startup 100 List. The company will use this new investment to drive product innovation and accelerate hiring in its London and Toronto offices. Trint’s team is on track to double this year (increasing from a workforce of 50 to 86 since the pandemic began) with plans to triple in size to 150 employees by July of 2021.
Trint will focus its 2021 strategy on rapid product innovation as it continues to build out a new market category it calls StoryTech. “StoryTech” gives content creators the tools to unlock the value of the spoken word so they can create compelling audio, video and text content simply and fast. Trint is currently releasing a software tool that allows users to build stories from audio and video on the Trint platform.
Trint’s focus on talented content creation teams in journalism, media, marketing, communications and branding was one of the primary reasons Edge came aboard. The investment firm’s portfolio primarily consists of companies operating within the creative economy, including Festicket, Jungle Creations, A Million Ads, and BLAST.
“Edge backs founders with purpose, and Emmy-winning former journalist and war correspondent Jeff Kofman is definitely a founder with a clear mission,” said David Glick, CEO and Founder of Edge Investments. “Seeing people transcribing interviews, speeches and news conferences in the 21st century the same archaic way journalists did in the 1970s, he realized that artificial intelligence (A.I.) and speech-to-text could do the heavy lifting of transcription. Spanning video, audio and the written word, Trint is a truly modern company solving a decades-old problem, and is poised to dominate its category.”
This year, Trint was honored by Deloitte as a UK Technology Fast 50 as the 28th fastest-growing company, with an average 1,571% growth rate over the last four years. The company also landed a top 10 spot in Startups.co.uk 100 list, which ranks the country’s top 100 fast-growth new UK businesses, and was recently named a finalist for two awards in the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards 2020 for its resilience, agility and innovation despite being faced with economic and logistical challenges as a result of COVID-19.
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Founded in 2014, Trint was the world’s first platform to leverage speech-to-text for audio, video and text content production. The product uses A.I. to automatically transcribe and translate, making multimedia content verifiable, searchable, editable and shareable. Available for both enterprise and individuals, Trint has offices in London and Toronto. Enterprise clients include Nike, The Associated Press, Airbnb, CNN, Spotify and many more.
About Edge Investments
Edge Investments is the leading growth investor in the UK creative economy. Since its launch in 2006 it has raised over £200m, investing in minority positions in companies benefitting from trends in creativity, lifestyle and associated technologies.
In November 2015 Edge launched Edge Creative Enterprise Fund, a £40 million fund with backing from the British Business Bank.
Edge backs businesses with purpose, creating superior returns for our investors by:
Core to Edge’s approach is its experienced team of creative economy and investment professionals. Individually and collectively, the Edge team has over 100 years of experience, totalling more than 60 investments in the creative economy.
Past and current investments in the creative economy include: BLAST, the global esports media network; Jungle Creations, one of the world’s most watched digital media companies, which recently ranked 4th in the Sunday Times’ Tech Track 100; A Million Ads, an advertising platform delivering personalization for digital audio adverts; Newsflare, a marketplace for user-generated video content; audioBoom, an on-demand audio and podcasting distribution platform and Festicket, Europe’s leading festival and travel platform. Edge Investments has also invested in children’s entertainment, live events and mobile games analytics.
Media inquiries:
Michael Nelson-Wolter, Trint: michael@trint.com
