Microsoft today confirmed that it has acquired SwiftKey — a startup based out of London that makes keyboard apps for Android and iOS devices and is already installed and used on some 300 million devices. The terms of the deal are not being disclosed but sources close to the deal tell us it’s $250 million in cash.
The news of the upcoming sale was first broken by the FT last night.
SwiftKey will continuing doing what it does, with the whole team joining Microsoft and becoming a part of the company’s ambitions to own the mobile productivity space — an area underscored by its previous acquisitions of Wunderlist and Acompli. Specifically it will in the coming months get integrated with Microsoft’s Word Flow technology for Windows.
“In this cloud-first, mobile-first world, SwiftKey’s technology aligns with our vision for more personal computing experiences that anticipate our needs versus responding to our commands, and directly supports our ambition to reinvent productivity by leveraging the intelligent cloud,” Harry Shum, EVP of technology and research, said in a blog post. He says that SwiftKey estimates that its users have saved nearly 10 trillion keystrokes, across 100 languages, saving more than 100,000 years in combined typing time.
Shum adds that Microsoft will continue to offer its apps across different platforms, and it’s a safe bet that we’ll see it integrated into Windows products, too.
“We’ll continue to develop SwiftKey’s market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio,” he writes. “Moreover, SwiftKey’s predictive technology aligns with Microsoft’s investments and ambition to develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.”
SwiftKey cofounders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock also have some words to say on the news.
More to come.
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