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Spinvox stays in the game

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 21 Mar 08, 10:42 GMT

, and now - three British technology companies (or at least with some British roots) which have made big money for their founders over the last year. But here's the difference - while the founders of Bebo and last.fm have sold up to giant American businesses, Spinvox is still independent and its owners are not yet cashing in their chips.

Spinvox is built on one very simple (and some might say niche) idea - turning voice into text. It started with a service which listens to your voicemails and sends them to you as texts and emails - and is now branching out into areas like allowing you to "speak" new blog postings. Not sure I'm ready for that kind of stream of consciousness.....

Anyway, this idea has apparently caught on with a number of mobile operators around the world, and Spinvox has now attracted big funding from some very big names. Goldman Sachs, perhaps the ritziest of the investment banks, and GLG, a big European hedge fund, are among the investors who have put $100m into the business, at a valuation of $500m.

Now that is a big price-tag on a company in its early years which has yet to prove that it can be profitable. It does claim to have some and has just taken on a Cambridge scientist who is a leader in the field. But when I met executives from Spinvox the other day they mentioned that a couple of other firms are also trying to move into this territory. Nobody big - just Google and Microsoft. The executives saw that as encouraging evidence that speech is hot right now. Others might see it as a warning that they are about to be steam-rollered.

Which makes it all the more brave (or perhaps foolhardy) for Spinvox's founders to decide they are staying in the game while others have cashed out. Bebo (like Facebook with Microsoft) could have offered a minority stake to a big investor and stayed independent, instead of selling up to AOL for $850m. Last.fm could have grown further before selling to CBS for $280m. But both decided that it was time to seek the shelter of a wealthy parent. There's no shame in that - after all, very few start-ups get as far as they did.

But watching Spinvox's attempt to continue growing - with the assistance of that hundred million dollars - as an independent British company will be a lot of fun.

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