That's why they call it money.

How much are NLP start-ups worth? About $100 million. That's about how much Nuance just paid for SpinVox, and that's about how much Microsoft paid for Powerset a year and a half ago. From TechCrunch:

SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated, has been acquired by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5 million.

Loyal perusers of The Linguist List's job board should be familiar will all of those companies. But don't let that price tag fool you, SpinVox also had $200 million in investment, so somebody's still waiting to get paid. (Disclaimer: yes, I understand that valuation is complicated and this coincidence in price tags means nothing, just funnin').