Nashville upstart Jimmie Allen joins forces with country music legend Brad Paisley for a song you know is different - in a good way - from the moment it starts.
When the town was the whole world,
and love was the girl next door.
Soundtrack was a song in the dark.
I miss those days.
When our dreams were there for chasin'…
But time was better wasted.
We were summer young, and livin' for a Friday…
And freedom was a highway.
If you went back to Alexa’s arrival and subsequent rapid growth phase in 2016/2017, there were essentially zero noteworthy acquisitions and very little M&A activity at all within the voice/AI space.
Now? There’s so many that despite the effort to list these acquisitions below - taken from just the past 12 months - I have no doubt that plenty were left out.
Take a good look at these various transactions, listed below.
You will see what I see: participation from every single industry vertical, deal sizes all over the place, and a true spectrum of value creation now nearly in full bloom.
The limiting factor of voice/AI acquisitions over the near term, remarkably, may end up being how many good companies there are in the space. There’s going to be vastly more potential buyers than sellers, for the foreseeable future.
See you in 2022.
January 28 - Algolia acquires MorphL
February 9 - Nuance acquires Saykara
February 26 - Cision buys Brandwatch
March 18 - Pindrop acquires Next Caller
March 23 - Peloton acquires Aiqudo
March 31 - Spotify acquires Betty Labs
April 12 - Microsoft buys Nuance for $19.7B
April 14 - TrillerNet acquires Amplify.ai
April 22 - Volley acquires Voxion
May 11 - SpinCar acquires Pulsar AI
May 11 - Verbit acquires VITAC
May 18 - StepStone acquires Mya
May 20 - PandoLogic acquires Wade & Wendy
May 24 - Amalgam Rx acquires Geetha
May 28 - Relativity buys Text IQ
June 1 - Embodied buys Kami Computing
June 30 - Zoom acquires Kites
July 15 - Zoominfo acquires Chorus.ai
July 20 - LivePerson acquires e-bot7
July 20 - Zoom acquires Five9 for $14.7B; canceled Oct 1
July 22 - Veritone acquires PandoLogic
July 23 - TinyChef acquires Zelish
July 27 - Uniphore acquires Jacada
July 28 - Nice acquires ContactEngine
August 10 - Hootsuite buys Heyday for $48M
August 16 - Qualtrics acquires Clarabridge
August 31 - Observe.AI acquires ScopeAI
September 2 - Verint acquires Conversocial
September 21 - Dubber acquires Notiv
September 24 - Gupshup acquires Dotgo
October 20 - Vonage buys Jumper.ai
October 27 - IBM acquires McDonald's McD Labs
October 28 - LivePerson buys VoiceBase and Tenfold
November 2 - Coinbase acquires Agara
November 2 - Walmart acquires Botmock
November 4 - Volara acquired by Uniguest
November 11 - Exotel, having merged with Ameyo, acquired Cogno.AI
November 15 - AudioCodes acquires Callverso
November 17 - Say It Now acquires GetStarted
December 2 - Genesys acquires Exceed.ai
Deepgram’s transcriptions of numerous talks, from Amazon to Lenovo to Ford Motor Company and many more (from October’s in-person Project Voice X) can be found here.
This Week In Voice, Season 6 Episode 5, hit podcast providers as well as YouTube, and features Audrey Arbeeny (Audiobrain), Paul Welham (Cereproc), and Sean Austin (Helios) discussing a number of key recent voice/AI stories.
Audiobrain is fresh off doing the sonic branding for their 8th-straight Olympic broadcast for NBC, Cereproc just launched the first on-mobile-device neural TTS system commercially available for iOS and Android, and Helios celebrated a company-altering biz dev win by integrating its API into Aiera’s well-known financial trading and monitoring platform.
Check out the episode here.