The Israeli company Copyleaks, which is developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-based product for identifying similarities and understanding the meaning of textual contents, has completed a $6 million Series A funding round led by the Israeli VC firm JAL Ventures.
Copyleaks has developed an AI-based online product that identifies the authenticity of text, which could be used in a host of applications, including the recognition of plagiarism. Using AI, the company’s technology identifies whether any text has been used in the past elsewhere, including cases where the text has been edited and even rephrased.
The service, available as both an online service as well as an application programming interface (API), is offered to institutional and private clients in more than 100 languages around the world, and used by organizations such as Macmillan Publishers, schools and universities such as Stanford and Oakland, content organizations such as the BBC and Medium, as well as corporations such as Cisco and Accenture that are seeking to ensure their copyrights are protected.
“Copyleaks’s technology can recognize the writer’s ‘voice’ and the meaning of things in the original text, thus managing to carry out a comparison and identify any non-original text in more than a hundred languages,” said Copyleaks CEO and founding partner Alon Yamin. “The great advantage of our system is our AI capabilities, which allow us to truly understand the text and thus identify non-original content that has been edited in one way or another.”
Copyleaks was founded by Yamin and CTO and founding partner Yehonatan Bitton, who teamed up to develop a solution to content plagiarism. Yamin and Bitton took on the challenge of developing a smart system capable of recognizing written content. The company now employs around 20 employees and operates from New York and Kiryat Shmona, where the development team is located.
Bitton said, “The current fundraising will enable us to significantly increase the number of developers in Israel, continue to develop essential technology for leading organizations, and strengthen Kiryat Shmona as a magnet for hi-tech and innovation companies. We are proud of our ability to export leading Israeli technology in its field.”
David Sikorsky, venture partner at JAL Ventures, said, “Copyleaks is a clear technology leader in the space of plagiarism detection. Its use of artificial intelligence allows for a very thorough search of similar texts across many sources, including translated text. While plagiarism detection has obvious benefits in the education market, there are many other uses in the enterprise sector that this technology is already addressing. We are particularly proud to participate in the development of the Kiryat Shmona region as a growing technological R&D ecosystem in Israel.”