Best of Boston

1995 Best Inventor Never to Succeed in Business

Raymond Kurzweil

Kurzweil’s first company, Kurzweil Music Systems, maker of a synthesizer that mimics 37 instruments, went into bankruptcy in 1990. The inventor’s latest adventure, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, specialists in voice recognition, is struggling in the wake of charges that its ex-treasurer booked false sales so that the company could show a profit when it went public, in 1993.