On Friday morning, Microsoft completed its $19.7 billion acquisition of nuance communications, a voice technology company, two days after the company completed its final regulatory hurdle.
Nuene and Microsoft announced the acquisition agreement in April 2021 11 months ago. It was originally expected to close by the end of 2021. It took longer than expected, reflecting the increasingly stringent scrutiny of technology transactions by regulators.
Nuance is headquartered in the Boston area. Through several acquisitions, including voicebox, swype, tweeddle, varolii and Jott, nuance has a large business in the Seattle area. Nuance last year acquired saykara, a Seattle health technology startup that provides voice assistants to clinicians.
Microsoft said the acquisition of nuance would bring new solutions combining voice, artificial intelligence and cloud technology to industries such as healthcare, retail, telecommunications and financial services.
The competition and Markets Authority found this week that the agreement “does not give the UK a realistic prospect of significantly reducing competition”. The EU ratified the agreement in December; The United States in June.
When announced, this will be the second largest deal in Microsoft’s history, second only to the company’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn. Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has outperformed both agreements since then, but it is expected to face tougher regulatory scrutiny given its size and broader impact.
On the basis of the existing partnership, health care will become the main focus of the two companies.
Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin and Microsoft cloud + AI executive vice president Scott Guthrie wrote: “we are committed to innovating new cutting-edge AI solutions to help healthcare become more personalized, affordable, effective and accessible, while continuing to improve the experience of patients and clinicians.”, Their broader plan was outlined in an article on Friday morning.
Benjamin will continue to serve as the CEO of nuance. As a part of Microsoft, he will report to Guthrie and follow the model similar to LinkedIn, that is, the acquired company will continue to operate with a certain degree of independence within Microsoft. Nuices had 6900 employees in September 2021.
Nuance’s results will be reported as part of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud department. The listed company had a revenue of $812 million and a net loss of $26.7 million in the latest fiscal year.