WIREDGOV

One of the key challenges for innovators is turning their bright idea into a commercially viable product. Early grant funding and support from Innovate UK, the new name for the Technology Strategy Board, helped two friends build a working prototype of their touchscreen keyboard app that predicts what users will write.

Six years later SwiftKey has grown from a two-person London based startup to a global business with 150 staff. And the app is being used in over 200 million devices around the world.

"Our initial insight was that the challenge lay with language not keyboards. We built a system that captured the way language works and how words flow together," said Ben Medlock, one of SwiftKey's co-founders.
 

The next step was turning this insight into a commercially viable product.
 

"The prototype we built with grant funding from Innovate UK helped us prove the technology worked. It was a critical step towards accessing venture capital investment and getting the app to market," Jon Reynolds, SwiftKey's other co-founder noted.

 

SwiftKey received two funding grants from Innovate UK - £15k for a feasibility study in 2008, and £50k to develop a working prototype in 2009.  

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