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  • Developer of 'social keyboard' Android app SwiftKey raises $2.4 million

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

    TouchType, the London-based company behind the popular SwiftKey Android applications, has raise $2.4 million (£1.5 million) in Series A funding in a round led by Octopus Investments.

    SwiftKey is a keyboard app that leverages TouchType’s natural language engine technology (dubbed Fluency) to learn a user’s writing style and try to accurately correct and even predict their text input. The idea is for the app to reduce the number of keystrokes and speed up text entry on smartphones and tablet computers.

    To date, SwiftKey has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times, TouchType says.

    The company will use the capital to enhance its products, strengthen its executive, commercial and technical teams and to increase its worldwide presence, particularly in the US and Asia.

    Octopus co-invested in TouchType with Cambridge Capital Group, Jon Craton (founder of Cramer Systems), Nick Hynes and Carl Uminski (CEO and COO of Somo, respectively), Richard Brennan (former CMO of Orange) and Andrew Thornton (barrister with Erskine Chambers).