Lernout & Hauspie was a dotcom era fraud that attracted investments from several major players, including a $45 million investment from Microsoft and millions more from Intel and the Belgian government. At one point, it was valued at $10B.
They claimed to have solved real time speech recognition and translation, and claimed to have over $300M in annual revenues. None of that was true. Their speech recognition software did not work, and they had very little revenue. Their management went to prison and it was one of the biggest financial frauds in modern European history at the time.