Index leads $17.5m round for SwiftKey

Ellie Pullen
04 September 2013

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Index Ventures has led a $17.5m series-B round for London-based virtual keyboard app SwiftKey, with participation from existing backer Octopus Investments and several angel investors.

The new capital will allow SwiftKey to finance further development in the key fields of natural language processing and machine learning. The company will also use the funding to enhance its text entry technology.

SwiftKey recently opened a new office in San Francisco to accelerate the company's expansion into the US market. SwiftKey's CEO and co-founder, Jon Reynolds, plans on relocating to the US office.

Previous funding
Octopus first backed SwiftKey in September 2010 with a $430,000 (£275,000) seed investment, as part of a $1.25m funding round. The round attracted investments from both angel and institutional investors, including angel syndicate Cambridge Capital Group.

The following year in December, SwiftKey raised a further $2.4m in its series-A round, which was led by Octopus and included investments from Cambridge Capital Group; Somo founders Nick Hynes and Carl Uminski; Erskine Chambers barrister Andrew Thornton; and former Orange Group CMO Richard Brennan.

Company
Founded in 2008, SwiftKey is the operating name of TouchType. The company is headquartered in London, with additional offices in San Francisco, Beijing and Seoul, and employs 100 staff.

SwiftKey develops the SwiftKey virtual keyboard, an app for Android devices that predicts the words a user is about to type based on previous sentence structure and character input.

People
SwiftKey was co-founded by CEO Jon Reynolds and CTO Ben Medlock. Jo Oliver is a director on the ventures team at Octopus, while Martin Mignot is a partner at Index.