Microsoft buys speech recognition company Nuance in $16B deal, second largest since LinkedIn
2 min readMicrosoft announced Monday that it will get speech recognition business Nuance Communications for $16 billion, the tech giant’s largest acquisition due to the fact it acquired LinkedIn for more than $26 billion in 2016.
The offer is the most recent signal Microsoft is hunting for additional advancement via acquisitions. The company is also reportedly in talks to obtain the chat app Discord for about $10 billion and last 12 months tried to buy TikTok’s U.S. organization for about $30 billion in advance of the deal was derailed. Previous thirty day period, Microsoft obtained gaming firm Zenimax for $7.6 billion.
Shares of Nuance were being up nearly 23 percent in premarket buying and selling Monday, representing approximately the exact quality Microsoft plans to fork out primarily based on the closing selling price Friday. Trading was halted on the stock just after that pop and are anticipated to resume investing all around 9 a.m. ET. Microsoft shares were a bit adverse.
Nuance sells instruments for recognizing and transcribing speech in doctor’s visits, shopper-company phone calls and voicemails.
Nuance would be aligned with the section of Microsoft’s small business that serves corporations and governments. Nuance derives income by offering tools for recognizing and transcribing speech in doctor’s visits, customer-service calls and voicemails. In its announcement Monday, Microsoft mentioned Nuance’s engineering will be applied to increase Microsoft’s cloud goods for overall health care, which ended up released final yr.
The organization reported $7 million in net cash flow on about $346 million in profits in the fourth quarter of 2020, with revenue declining 4 percent on an annualized foundation. Nuance was established in 1992, and experienced 7,100 workforce as of September 2020.
Microsoft explained Nuance’s CEO Mark Benjamin will stay at the firm and report to Scott Guthrie, the Microsoft executive in demand of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence corporations.
Nuance has a potent standing for its voice recognition technologies, and it has been regarded as an acquisition target for firms like Apple, Microsoft and much more for quite a few several years. Microsoft has voice recognition designed into lots of of its items presently, but it has a short while ago shut down some goods featuring its voice assistant Cortana.
