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Enough of that, let's start the show. Good morning and welcome to Equity's Monday episode our weekly primer

where we catch up on the news and as always explore the numbers behind the headlines.

My name is Alex and I am back after a few days off last week.

So first a big thanks to Natasha and Danny and Grace for holding down the fort so I could

breathe a little.

There's a lot of really fun stuff coming from my side of the Tech Ranch House,

so please stay tuned.

But forget all of that.

We have a mountain of news to get through,

so let's get going.

All right, so the weekend, the biggest news from this weekend is that Microsoft is likely to announce the acquisition of nuanced communications today for about 1616 billion according to recent reporting.

Now as CMBC notes at that price the deal would be the second largest Microsoft deal ever coming

only second to the Microsoft LinkedIn buy that was worth $24 billion.

More importantly, however, I think is what the deal actually is.

So Nuance is a public company that sells what it calls, quote, conversational AI.

In short, this is the deal that could see Microsoft, the second most

valuable tech company in the world, dropped well north of 10 billion on commercial AI tech.

The deal, if it goes through, could be a shot on the arm for AI startups and the broader health tech space,

because it never hurts to see a massive incumbent drop a zillion dollars for a company that you can handwave towards as a comp.

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