Microsoft Finalizes $16B Nuance Purchase

Microsoft has finalized its $16 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) and speech technology firm Nuance Communications, the software giant said Friday (March 4).

“Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance’s best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft’s secure and trusted industry cloud offerings,” Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president overseeing its cloud and AI group, said in a news release.

Read more: $16B Microsoft/Nuance Deal to Get EU Approval

Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin said the combination of Nuance’s expertise in healthcare, financial services, retail, telecommunications and other industries with Microsoft’s global cloud ecosystems will let the company accelerate innovation and deploy solutions more quickly and at a greater scale. Benjamin will retain his role and report to Guthrie, the companies said.

The deal was first announced in April of 2021, the result of a previous collaboration between Microsoft and Nuance on a healthcare administration automation project.

As PYMNTS has noted, Nuance’s key offering is transcription technology, which is popular with doctors — the company says it serves more than 75% of U.S. hospitals.

The deal received U.S. antitrust approval in April but was briefly held up in Europe when the EU’s antitrust authority announced plans to take a closer look at the purchase.

Read more: Microsoft’s Activision Bid to Draw Scrutiny Across Regulatory Agencies and on Capitol Hill

The European Commission’s competition bureau wanted to survey customers and competitors to fill out a questionnaire listing their concerns about the deal to determine whether the two companies were in competition and whether Microsoft would give Nuance preferential treatment over competitors. However, news broke just days later that the commission was set to approve the purchase.

The deal represents Microsoft’s largest since it purchased LinkedIn for $26 billion in 2016. Both purchases will be dwarfed by the company’s acquisition of video game company Activision – assuming it is approved – which carries a price tag of $69 billion.