Microsoft

Capptain was a Paris-based startup offering a mobile analytics and push-notification platform that let app developers track usage and send targeted engagement messages.

Data warehouse appliances with leading price and performance

Entropic Inc. was a speech recognition company, spun out of the Washington Research Laboratory, that developed signal processing software and Hidden Markov Model techniques underlying modern speech recognition.

Provides advanced speech input and output.

Pioneer in using big data to predict airfare and travel price changes; acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

GitHub is a developer platform for writing, reviewing, testing, and deploying code, with collaboration tools and AI assistance for software teams. It serves developers and businesses from startups to enterprises across industries, and includes security and automation features for the software development lifecycle.

Hexadite was an Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup that built an agentless, AI-driven platform (AIRS) to automatically investigate and remediate security alerts. Its technology was integrated into Microsoft's security products after acquisition.

LinkedIn is the professional network — profiles, connections, job listings and a feed built around work rather than friendship. Reid Hoffman started it in his living room in late 2002 with four co-founders drawn from PayPal and his earlier company SocialNet, and the site launched in May 2003. It went public on the NYSE in 2011 and Microsoft bought it in 2016 for $26.2 billion in cash, still among the largest software acquisitions ever made; it now runs as a Microsoft subsidiary with more than a billion registered members.

LiveLoop was a San Francisco startup that made a PowerPoint plugin and cloud service enabling real-time sharing, viewing, and editing of presentations via web links without software installation.

Mover was an Edmonton-based startup providing cloud data migration services, letting users move, sync, and back up files between providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and Amazon S3. It later specialized in enterprise migration into Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint.

Nuance Communications developed AI-driven speech-recognition and conversational-AI software, including Dragon dictation and clinical documentation tools widely used in healthcare and enterprise settings.

AI-powered medical scribe technology to reduce doctors' paperwork and workload

Nuance creates software products, including healthcare solutions for clinical documentation, speech recognition, and virtual assistants. The company is committed to accessibility for users with disabilities.

Osmos was a Seattle-based startup, founded in 2019, that built an AI-driven, no-code platform for automating data ingestion, cleaning, and transformation from messy external sources like spreadsheets and PDFs into enterprise systems.

StorSimple built hybrid cloud storage appliances that combined on-premises enterprise storage with cloud/object storage like Amazon S3 and Azure via iSCSI, tiering hot and cold data automatically.

Vicinity Corporation developed location-based mapping technology, offering store-locator and enterprise mapping tools accessible via web, wireless, and speech platforms.

Xamarin was a San Francisco software company founded in 2011 that built cross-platform mobile development tools letting developers write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps using shared C#/.NET code.