VentureBeat

SpinVox, a London company that converts your voicemail into text, has raised more than $100 million to expand quickly by signing deals with large telecom carriers around the world — an apparent land-grab.

The amount of cash is significant, and a sign that SpinVox wants to sign up carriers before competitors such as Nuance or other emerging players, such as Jott or Simulscribe get there first.

Its SpinVox’s third round of capital, and investors include GLG Partners, Goldman Sachs, BlueMountain Capital Management and hedge fund Toscafund. It doubles the company’s investment. It had previously raised $100 million, including from ABN Amro, Gartmore, Allen & Co. and individuals. The six-year-old company has signed deals with 12 carriers, including with Alltel Corp., Cincinnati Bell, and Telus, and wants to double that number this year. The company is especially strong in Europe, though, allowing conversion of messages in English, French, German and Spanish.

It’s also hip, letting you do things like write text messages with your voice, blog via a telephone call, and use voice to update your profile at Facebook, Jaiku and Twitter.

SpinVox claims more than 6 million users.We’ve mentioned SpinVox before, in coverage of newer players like Jott, which is free and actually uses people to do the translations.

Update: Meanwhile, private equity fund Quadriga Capital Russia is reportedly negotiating a sale of its 35 percent stake in Speech Technology Center (STC), a St. Petersburg-based developer of speech recognition technologies, according to Kommersant (which we found via Yakov Sadchikov). Nokia and Nuance are mentioned as possible buyers.

Amgen suddenly has a voracious appetite for startups. In its second deal this week, the biotech giant acquired Cambridge, Mass., biotech Alantos Pharmaceuticals for $300 million in cash. (The release is here.)

Founded in Heidelberg, Germany in 1999, Alantos changed its name from Therascope in 2003 and moved to Cambridge in 2004. The company develops traditional “small molecule” drugs — that is, therapies that can be delivered as pills rather than shots — for a variety of conditions; its lead candidate is a novel type of diabetes drug called a DPP-IV inhibitor now in early-stage trials. Should it succeed, that drug seems likely to face significant competition; Merck’s DPP-IV inhibitor Januvia is already on the market, and several other pharmas and biotechs are pursuing their own.

According to VentureWire (subscription required), Alantos’ backers included Oxford Bioscience Partners, SV Life Sciences, Heidelberg Innovation, Ventech and ABN Amro. It has raised a total of $47 million, making this a nice payday for the company’s European investors.

Following Amgen’s $420 million acquisition of Ilypsa, that makes $720 million the big biotech has dropped on startups this week — a substantial sum by any measure. Last fall, Amgen also acquired Mountain View, Calif.-based Avidia for up to $380 million, so that’s well over $1 billion it has committed to startup acquisitions over the past nine months.

The mini-spree marks a recent departure for the biotech, which over the past five years has tended to acquire other public biotechs with marketed or late-stage products such as Immunex, Abgenix and Tularik. It suggests that Amgen is feeling some pressure to refill its pipeline, although since the payoff is still likely some time away, it likely isn’t related to the company’s recent problems with its anemia-drug franchise or its new colon-cancer drug Vectibix.