Investors receive pocket change from Spinvox sale

Voice-to-text conversion business Spinvox has been sold for $102.5 million (£63 million), less than the total amount of venture capital invested in the company.

NASDAQ-quoted speech recognition company Nuance acquired the UK-based company which launched in 2003 and
aspired to become the ‘worldwide leader in voice messaging’, according to 33-year-old founder Christina Domecq, a descendant of the Domecq family of sherry-makers.

Spinvox had raised £100 million from investors including investment bank Goldman Sachs and asset management
giant Gartmore, but attracted unwanted media attention after a BBC blog drew attention to the limitations of its speech recognition technology.

Shareholders in the company received just £600 from the sale to Nuance, according to an extract from a letter to employees published by the BBC.

In an interview with Business XLin April 2008, Domecq remarked, ‘We’ve dealt with our investors the same way all along and that is to manage expectations...You have to be as candid when things aren’t so good as when everything is going well.’

John Pollard, Nuance’s VP for voice-to- text says Spinvox’s ‘robust infrastructure, language support and operation experience’ will ‘broaden the capabilities’ of its speech recognition platform