Seattle-based Swype, a maker of text-input software for touch screens, has raised $5.6 million in Series B equity financing from new investors Samsung Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners, and returning investor Benaroya Capital. The funding should help Swype expand its technology to more mobile phones around the world, and eventually explore other types of devices as well.
This is one of the larger second-round tech deals we’ve seen in Seattle lately, and it is encouraging news for Swype. The company raised $1.3 million back in April, and just this month released its first product, on the Samsung Omnia II smartphone. The significance of the new funding, which the company hopes is the last round it will need, is that Swype now has two of the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers supporting its technology—and could be poised for mass-market adoption.
Sort of like with “The Matrix,” nobody can tell you what Swype is—you have to try it for yourself to fully appreciate it. So I recently visited the company’s office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood to play around with its mobile interface. The basic idea is that instead of using your thumbs, or touch-typing like on a full-size keyboard, you drag your finger from letter to letter, picking it up between words, and the software figures out lightning-fast what you’re typing, on a word-by-word basis (even if you’re a little sloppy). It’s based on the relative likelihood of words—you’re more likely to type “this” than “thus,” for instance—and the program adapts to how often you actually type each word.
Swype’s chief operating officer, Aaron Sheedy, says that if you show Swype to anyone under 25, they immediately pick up the phone and start working it with one hand. Me, not so much. I could almost feel my neurons rewiring as I struggled to connect one letter to the next; one way to describe it is that I’m not used to typing serially, I do it more in parallel. But Sheedy says most new users get up to “high-level productivity speeds” of typing 30 words per minute or more within just a few days.
Sheedy says that the new funds will be used to advance the company’s “deployment of software in the market—more languages, more operating systems, more devices. So Swype can really be a global input mechanism for touch screens,” with the primary focus being on mobile phones first. That’s before it branches out into things like GPS units, tablet computers, TVs, and video game
