Bachir Halimi started Speech Mobility in 2012 to build telecom products that make business communications smart, mobile and safe on the road. He also founded Excendia, the company that developed the virtual assistant powering the Evatel cloud phone system. Bachir's life as a serial entrepreneur started in 1981 with Alis Technologies, the company that made computers usable in non-Latin languages (sold to Microsoft in 1986), then MediaSoft Telecom in 1987, a voice toolkit vendor sold to Bell Canada in 2004 after receiving investment from Intel in 2000.