InfoTalk raises funds to push good ideas
2001-05-30
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Hong Kong's InfoTalk Corp has overcome the sceptical investment climate, raising US$ 12
million to expand the development of its multilingual speech recognition technology for telephones.
Founder and chief executive Alex Leung acknowledged it was difficult looking for money while technology was out of favour with investors, but maintained that good ideas would still attract positive attention.
"The market is certainly not as good as it was even six months ago, but this can still be the time for opportunity," he said.
In its first round of funding two years ago, InfoTalk raised US$ 5 million. Mr Leung said the latest round met the company's expectations.
Major investments came from large financial institutions including imGO, Accenture Technology Ventures and HSBC Private Equity (Asia). Walden International, an investment group that had previously invested in InfoTalk, agreed to put in more money.
Mr Leung said he would use the investment to support more research and undertake a rapid expansion. In the past five months, InfoTalk has doubled its staff to between 120 and 150. It does research in Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing and lays claim to being the biggest Asian player in the speech recognition technology field.
Founded in 1996, InfoTalk focuses on Asian languages and has developed technology capable of recognising numerous Chinese dialects and understanding different accents of English.
The company's flagship product, e-t@lk, is used by Bank of East Asia, China Telecom, Hong Kong Jockey Club, Hong Kong and China Gas Co, Pacific Century CyberWorks HKT and Taiwan Paging Networks.
The expansion plans include improvements to e-t@lk and support for the Japanese, Korean, Thai and Malaysian languages.
"We want to keep pushing the frontier," Mr Leung said.
He predicted there would be growing demand for speech recognition technology in Asia, particularly for next-generation phone handsets that enabled users to surf the Internet at high speed.
"In China there are six million computers connected to the Internet and 250 million phones. It is obvious which way will become more popular to use the Internet," he said.
Michael Ricks, chief executive of imGO, said he was impressed with InfoTalk's success at taking technology out of the laboratory and putting it into commercial use. "We believe that (the company) will continue to expand its dominant market position," he said.
Marcus Thompson, chief investment officer of HSBC Private Equity (Asia), said InfoTalk's success at expanding its client base was also an attractive feature.
Earlier this year, Li Haizhou and his team of researchers were hired after leaving competitor Lernout & Hauspie.
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