Lernout & Hauspie
Coordinates: 50°52′09″N 2°53′34″E / 50.86918°N 2.89281°E
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a leading Belgium-based speech recognition technology company, founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, that went bankrupt in 2001 because of a fraud engineered by management. The company was based in Ypres, Flanders, in what was then called the Flanders Language Valley (mimicking the Silicon Valley).
Lernout & Hauspie was founded in 1987 by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. After a difficult start, it quickly grew, and, in 1995, it went public on the NASDAQ (LHSP), and was also quoted on the now-defunct Brussels-based EASDAQ exchange. Its headquarters were in Ieper, Belgium, and in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. At its peak, Lernout & Hauspie had a market capitalization of almost US$10 billion.
Flanders played an important role in investing in the company and the surrounding Flanders Language Valley. Lernout & Hauspie quickly became Flanders' pride.
It acquired a number of its smaller competitors, including text-to-speech developer Berkeley Speech Technologies, in 1996. During March–April 2000, Lernout & Hauspie acquired Dictaphone for nearly US$1 billion, then acquired Dragon Systems shortly thereafter. Lernout & Hauspie provided the voice-recognition technology needed to propel Dictaphone's voice recognition enhanced transcription system. This system was started by a company called Articulate Systems, and sold and supported by a company called The MRC Group (later Fonix, then SpeechFX) before becoming part of L&H.
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