Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella really wants to spend cash.
As reported by CNBC, Nadella tried to buy TikTok last year for ~$30B. Since that deal fell apart, Microsoft has been linked to a number of huge-dollar deals:
- $7.6B for gaming company Zenimax
- ~$10B for a potential acquisition of chat platform Discord (TBD if deal will close)
- $16B for Nuance Communications, a speech recognition company
The Nuance deal was announced on Monday
And it will be Microsoft’s largest acquisition since buying LinkedIn in 2016 for $26B+.
Per CNBC, Nuance primarily sells “tools for recognizing and transcribing speech in doctor office visits, customer-service calls and voicemails.” Revenue hit ~$1.5B in 2020.
The deal will help boost Microsoft’s health care platform
Burnout is a big issue in the health care field, and the deluge of administrative work (e.g., note taking, report writing) contributes to the problem.
Doctors can use Nuance tech — which is already integrated with Microsoft Teams for virtual visits — to record conversations and automatically transcribe high-quality notes.
In general, the digitization of health care is a huge market, and Sadella seems more than happy to throw cash at the opportunity.
