SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated, has been acquired by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5 million. We reported on the rumors of the acquisition a few weeks ago, when a $150 million price tag was floating around.
Nuance will integrate SpinVox’s services with its speech recognition platform. SpinVox, which has raised close to $200 million in funding, develops both web apps, including Spin-My-Blog and Facebook and Twitter integration, and mobile technologies. SpinVox has partnerships with a number of mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile.
SpinVox’s investors ended up with $0.50 cents on the dollar; the company raised too much money and didn’t deliver. A competitor in the space SimulScibe, just struck a deal worth $17 million with Ditech, which seems to be more of a rational value for the transcription service. The last round of funding valued SpinVox at $500 million and there were rumors of the startup heading for an IPO. It turns out that was all spin.