Nuance emerges as buyer of Jott

Earlier today, I reported that Seattle startup Jott had been acquired. At the time, I didn't know the purchase price or the buyer. All I knew was that a large communications company had recently gobbled up Jott. But some details are starting to emerge -- thanks in part to the sleuthing of our faithful readers. 

After much chatter on TechFlash today about possible acquirers, a reader this evening discovered a pretty interesting tidbit on the Web site of one of Jott's venture backers. Ackerley Partners spells it out pretty clearly, noting that Jott was acquired by Nuance Communications last month.

That makes a heck of a lot of sense because Nuance -- a Burlington, Mass.-based company with revenue of more than $900 million last year  -- is a leader in speech recognition technologies.

Jott, as was pointed out earlier today, has developed a voice-to-text technology that converts voice notes into text that can be delivered via email or text message.

Nuance, with more than 6,000 employees, also has been highly acquisitive in recent months. And it already has operations in Seattle thanks in part to its $180 million purchase last year of Bellevue mobile software company SnapIn Software.

In 2007, Nuance purchased the T9 text input software -- originally developed by Seattle's Tegic Communications -- from AOL. More recently, it completed an acquisition of mobile search and advertising company Zi Corp.

Earlier this year, Nuance announced that private equity firm Warburg Pincus had invested $175 million that it could use for possible M&A activity.

Nuance couldn't be reached for comment, and Jott CEO John Pollard declined to comment earlier today on our initial report.

But an announcement of the deal is expected as early as Tuesday.

Jott raised about $7 million from Ackerley Partners, Bain Capital, Draper Richards and others. We're still trying to track down the purchase price, so if anyone has clues on that, please let us know.

John Cook is co-founder of TechFlash. Follow him on Twitter @johnhcook.

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