With its smart keyboard, Typewise aims to help users type faster and error-free on their smartphones. The company counts more than 65’000 users since the soft launch last year. The Basel-Land based startup has secured $1 million in a seed round to explore new application areas.
Typewise’s keyboard was designed for typing on a smartphone (iOS and Android) while protecting privacy. Thanks to its hexagon arrangement, the virtual keys for the individual letters are larger than usual to enable typing with two thumbs. Beyond a user-friendly layout, the Typewise keyboard analyses which individual keys are pressed to provide the best possible autocorrection without incorrect corrections. A specially developed neural network suggests suitable words to the user and learns them independently. Unlike other keyboards, this AI runs completely offline and thus guarantees the user 100% privacy. The app supports over 40 languages.
Following the launch last year, the app has more than 250,000 downloads with some 65,000 active users worldwide. Moving forward, the startup has raised one million Swiss francs, which includes $700K from business angels and $340K from Innosuisse as part of an Innosuisse project in collaboration with the ETH.
The funds will be used to enhance the prediction engine and to bring the technology to other application areas such as text desktops or wearables.
“The goal is to develop a world-leading text prediction engine that runs completely on-device,” says co-founder David Eberle to Techcrunch. “The smartphone keyboard is the first use case. It is great to test and develop our algorithms in a real-life setting with tens of thousands of users. The larger play is to bring word/sentence completion to any application that involves text entry, on mobiles or desktop (or in future also wearables/VR/Brain-Computer Interfaces)”.
(Press release/RAN)
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