The Israeli startup Copyleaks, today (Tuesday) announces the completion of a $6 million Series A funding round led by JAL Ventures. Connecticut Innovations Investment Fund, which participated in the startup's seed funding, also participated in the round.
Plagiarism detection–no more using paraphrasing to cheat
Yehonatan Bitton, Copyleaks CTO, was working for his family’s business prior to founding the startup. It was there that he and the company’s business developers discovered that content from their website was copied, which had then damaged the site's ranking in search engines. And so, Bitton and Alon Yamin (Copyleaks CEO), who had met during their army service in the IDF’s 8200 intelligence corps, teamed up to create a solution to stop the content plagiarism that was plaguing the Bitton Family business. And like any plagiarism platform, their solution could also be used for the higher education sector.
Copyleaks has developed an AI-based online product that identifies the authenticity of a text. The idea was to create a flexible tool that can track the distribution of content on the internet in a smarter way, with smarter capabilities; The platform used artificial intelligence to identify similarities and understand the meaning of textual contents to determine text authenticity and thus prevent plagiarism. So, the technology identifies whether any text has been used in the past elsewhere, including cases where the text has been edited and even rephrased. Moreover, Copyleaks can recognize the meaning behind text, compare it to others, and identify any non-original text that has been edited in one way or another. Copyleaks doesn't just rely on comparing identical words, rather it understands conceptual and structural imagery–that is what makes their solution standout from other plagiarism and copyright infringement platforms. Even if all the words of a text have been changed yet the sentence structure, meaning, and context are similar Copyleaks is able to identify it. They are therefore a much more sophisticated plagiarism platform. What’s more is that not only does it do a thorough search of similar texts across a slew of sources, it works for over 100 languages and also identifies translated texts.
How it works? Copyleaks’ system consists of many algorithms responsible for scanning the Internet to find similar texts and build predictions, based on data, about which parts of the text will be copied and from where. They analyze the text using NLP in order to understand the meaning, context and even the writing style, which leads to a much smarter and deeper comparison than just a comparison of words to words.
Copyleaks enables content producers, publishers, academic institutions, and any company that has content, to verify the originality of the text and its distribution on the web. Some customers of Copyleaks include Macmillan Publishers, Stanford University, the BBC, and Cisco. Their platform is offered as an online service for registered users or as an API embedded in the customers' systems, be it LMS, CMS, writing tools, or document management systems. With the new capital, Copyleaks will continue to develop its technology by hiring more developers for its R&D team.
Copyleaks was founded in 2015 by Alon Yamin (CEO) and Yehonatan Bitton (CTO). To date, they have raised a total of $7.8 million and employ 20 people in Israel and New York.
