The two founders and joint chairmen of speech recognition company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV are putting around $186m into a new company that will invest in IT companies where speech and language technology plays an important part. Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie say that the company, L&H Investment Company, or LHIC, is backed by half of their 20% holding in L&H and aims to attract other strategic investors. LHIC has already made its first investments and has taken a stake in Applied Voice Recognition Inc, a Houston, Texas developer of voice recognition software for the healthcare IT industry. LHIC has also invested in four private companies: ViA Inc, a Minnesota-based maker of wearable computing and communications products; Mindmaker Inc, a San Jose, California producer of artificial intelligence technology components; Mediacom Technologies PTE Ltd, a Singapore based designer of telecommunications products; and Star + Globe Technologies Pyte Ltd, a Singapore-based provider of multilingual software. LHIC expects to take around a 15% stake in most of its investments. While most of its activities will be related to speech, language and artificial intelligence, LHIC says that none of its investments will be direct competitors of Lernout & Hauspie.
