Police1’s Spotlight articles introduce the products and services of a valued sponsor in their own words. This article highlights Rev, an industry-leading company that since 2010 has been trusted by journalists and researchers to surface essential details from complex stories. That same foundation of accuracy and integrity now powers Rev’s work within the justice system — where the stakes are higher than ever.
Where did your company name originate from?
Our company name, Rev, originated from the idea that speed is crucial, like revving your engines. We wanted a name that told people their work would come back fast, and that the people behind it were ready to go.
Speed is still a big part of what we do. Investigators have told us they used to wait two to four weeks for a transcript to come back. Now it arrives in minutes, while the case is still fresh and the follow-up questions are still worth asking.
Those same investigators taught us that speed only counts if the record is right. A fast transcript with the wrong word in the wrong place does not help anyone once it is in front of a DA or a hearing officer. So the name has come to mean both fast enough to get through the evidence inside the shift, and accurate enough to stand behind when the case leaves your desk.
What was the inspiration behind starting your company?
Rev started with a straightforward idea: Build the most accurate transcription platform in the world and create real work for the skilled people who would do it. Underneath that was a purpose that has not changed since, which is getting people closer to the truth. A transcript is the most literal version of that. Here is exactly what was said, timestamped, complete and you can check it yourself.
We were handed the hardest audio anyone had. Jail calls, hearings, interviews in rooms with bad acoustics and worse microphones. The people who found us first were researchers, academics and investigative journalists, and then investigators and attorneys started showing up on their own. That is really the answer to when we realized Rev could help law enforcement: We didn’t decide to get into it, we noticed we were already in it.
Then investigators told us the second thing, which was more important. The transcript was never the whole job. It was one step in a much longer piece of work, and everything before and after it was manual: pulling the moment that mattered out of 40 hours of body cam, comparing what a subject said across three interviews, building the chronology, typing the report from scratch, getting the file to command staff and the DA. The transcript only got you to the doorstep, so we built the rest of it. That is why we describe Rev today as an investigative platform rather than a transcription service.
What is your signature product and how does it work?
Rev is an investigative platform, and everything in it sits on one record for the case. It is CJIS compliant, which for an agency is not a nice-to-have. It is the gate that has to be cleared before anything else matters.
It works in three steps. First, put the evidence in. Record an interview on the Rev mobile app or upload it, along with body cam, jail calls, photos and scanned or handwritten documents, and a 96%+ accurate transcript comes back in minutes rather than weeks. Second, do the work in Rev. Ask questions across every file in the case at once and draft the report from a template built for the job: IA, criminal investigations, PREA or traffic. Third, share it. Every finding cites back to the exact timestamp, page or image it came from, so whoever receives it can check it in one click.
When an interview is headed to a termination hearing, arbitration or court, any file can be upgraded to human-verified transcription. That is 99%+ accuracy, guaranteed, in 12 hours or less, or as little as two hours with rush.
Why do you believe your products are essential to law enforcement?
Over the last decade the volume of evidence in a typical case has grown roughly twelvefold: more body cam, more dash cam, more devices, more jail calls. Meanwhile there are still 24 hours in a day, headcount is flat or shrinking, and budgets have not moved. One department we work with had 21 open positions when we spoke with them. That is not a failure of the people doing the work, it is arithmetic. And the result is always the same: A fact nobody found is a fact that didn’t count.
For police and corrections agencies, the case for Rev usually comes down to four things, and they tend to come up in this order: It is the alternative to adding a position they cannot fill. It gives investigators the hours to work open cases, and clearance is what command staff gets asked about. It pulls documentation back inside the shift and off the overtime budget. And at one corrections agency, Rev came out nearly even with what they were already paying for human transcription, which made approval simple.
What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?
The honest answer is that most of criminal justice is still on the first rung. They send audio out and get a transcript back, which is where our relationship with a lot of agencies started 15 years ago. The value shows up further up: every file type in one place, questions asked of the whole case at once, your agency’s own report formats built into the platform and the case handed off from a single cited record. Getting people up that path takes trust, and in this world trust is earned one investigator at a time.
So we keep it simple, and we say plainly what Rev does not do. We show agencies a few report types that match the job, like IA, PREA and criminal investigations, rather than a long menu of options. Rev does not process phone extraction data, so if you are working a phone download, that part of the job still happens outside Rev. And we are bringing retired officers onto our sales and customer success teams, because an investigator should be able to talk to someone who has sat in the interview room.
What makes your company unique?
We build for every side of the case. Investigators, prosecutors and defense attorneys all use Rev, which is deliberate and unusual in this category. That is not a neutrality pose; it is the only way this works. A record that only one side trusts is not a record, it is an argument. We’re not on a side. We’re on the record.
Most tools speed up one step of the job. Rev holds the whole case in one place and analyzes every file in it at once, with every finding cited back to the source.
We have also spent 15 years on the hardest audio anyone has, and Rev is a closed system. It reads what you give it and nothing else, and your evidence is never shared with third-party AI models. It does not decide what a statement means, and it does not tell you whether someone is being truthful. A model can read faster than any person alive, but it cannot be responsible for another human life.
You will get faster, better armed and more certain, and you will still be the one who decides.
What do your customers like best about you and your products?
Accuracy comes up first. Investigators tell us Rev’s transcripts meet or beat the human transcription they were paying for before, including words that used to come back marked unintelligible.
Next is that it was built for their environment. One buyer told us we were the only transcription vendor in his evaluation that put CJIS compliance up front, and investigators value that the answers come from the evidence they uploaded and not from the internet.
Then there is what it lets them find. A corrections unit working an inmate drug trafficking case loaded hundreds of recorded jail calls at once and pulled out names, dates and drug terminology they had no idea were in there. Their estimate was that manual review would have taken three to six months.
Last, they like the people. Customers have told us about Rev staff who gave out their cell numbers, answered fast and built a PREA template to match one agency’s exact report format. Agencies on our unlimited plan get a dedicated investigative workflow specialist for that reason.
What is the most rewarding part of serving the law enforcement community?
In Southern California, detectives had spent years unable to build a chargeable case against a health care worker suspected of assaulting patients at multiple facilities. Each agency held a piece. No one held the whole picture. A lead detective loaded the reports from every agency into Rev and asked it to surface the similarities, and he was finally able to see the pattern that had been sitting in the evidence all along. That gave the DA what was needed to file, and the state later opened its own investigation. The detective did that work. Rev made sure he could see all of it.
Investigators also tell us that documentation used to follow them home, on nights and weekends. Getting that work back inside the shift gives them more time for the case, and more time for what matters outside the job.
And then there is something a county investigator told us, unprompted: that he does not care whether somebody is innocent or guilty, he cares about the truth. That is who we build for.
What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?
Everything we are building points at one idea: A case should have one record.
Not a folder of transcripts here, a report typed in Word there and an evidence packet on a thumb drive that stops being connected to anything the moment it leaves the building. One record. Every piece of evidence in it, every finding drawn inside it, every citation live and every person who needs it on it, whether that is the lead and backup investigators, command staff or DA.
That changes three things at once. All the evidence goes in one place, because a case you can only search half of is a case you are guessing about. The work happens where the evidence is, so the report keeps its links back to the source. And the record itself is what you hand off, so the DA gets the evidence, the findings and the ability to check both the first time.
The goal we have set is to make Rev the investigative platform criminal justice runs on, so no fact that could change a case goes unfound. Same purpose we started with, applied to the whole case instead of one recording.