Cielo24

Market position

cielo24 competed in the transcription, captioning and media accessibility market against providers such as Rev, 3Play Media and Verbit, positioning on human-in-the-loop accuracy, multilingual support and ease of upload as well as cost-effectiveness. Following its closure, competitors publicly targeted its customer base, noting gaps in the acquirer's offering around live captioning, audio description, localization and platform integrations.

Technology

A hybrid machine-and-human platform for speech-to-text: automated speech recognition and machine learning combined with human editing and quality review to produce transcripts, time-aligned word-level datasets, captions, translations and keyword/metadata extraction. The cielo24 Web Services Platform API exposed job creation and management, media upload (including pre-signed URLs and embedded media), transcription and translation ordering, transcript, caption and ElementList retrieval, caption burn-in, aggregate statistics, sub-accounts, callbacks and polling.

Go-to-market

Direct sales into education, media and enterprise accounts supported by a free trial and self-service portal, developer API access, and integrations with video and learning platforms; the company maintained a blog and public API documentation. Its team included staff in strategic accounts and customer success roles.

Video publishers and content owners in the entertainment, enterprise and education markets, including universities, media organizations and online course platforms; named clients have included Coursera, The Wall Street Journal, Kaltura and Harvard.

Geography

Headquartered at 1029 State Street, Santa Barbara, California, with offices opened in New York and California during its growth period; services covered English and foreign-language captioning, translation and localization.

History

Founded in 2012 as a transcription company spun out of another Santa Barbara startup, with the initial aim of making spoken media searchable for online platforms and higher education institutions. Between 2014 and 2015 the team explored using its corpus of labeled speech data to train machine learning models. The company raised venture funding, opened offices in New York and California, and grew to nearly 70 employees at its peak. In 2016 it reported doubling ARR to $3.9M with clients including Coursera, The Wall Street Journal, Kaltura and Harvard. Shanna Johnson, an early employee and COO, left in 2016 during a difficult fundraising period and was brought back by the board as CEO in 2019, at which point the company held thousands of dollars in cash against millions in liabilities; it returned to profitability within 18 months, aided by pandemic-driven demand for online courses and digital media, and paid down debt. After losing its largest customer, profitability disappeared and the company wound down, using SimpleClosure to manage the shutdown. Rev acquired cielo24 and the service closed on September 30, 2025, with the company's decade-plus of data assets sold to a buyer in language technology for a mid-six-figure amount.

Risks & controversies

The business was concentrated enough that the loss of its largest customer eliminated profitability and contributed to the decision to wind down. During the shutdown the company faced cap table complexity, creditor obligations, voting thresholds and asset disposition; a formal assignment for the benefit of creditors was considered too expensive. Competitors noted that customer data would not automatically transfer to the acquirer and raised questions about data security and platform flexibility.