Techie who gave up his share of a £25m fortune – for a bike!
AT the time, it seemed like a good deal. Chris HillScott agreed to accept a bicycle in exchange for his share in a business that he and two university friends were struggling to get off the ground.
The business, which was developing a mobile phone app that could guess the next words that users typed, had been a struggle. The three were working long hours, for no pay. HillScott wanted out to pursue a career in photography. Because his friends Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock didn’t have any spare funds, they offered the bike.
On Wednesday this week, though, that deal – made in 2008 – was filling 29-year- old Hill- Scott with regret. ‘The biggest mistake I have ever made,’ he said on social network Twitter.
Reynolds and Medlock had just sold the app, now called SwiftKey, to Microsoft for a reported £174m. Reynolds and Medlock are each thought to have made £25 mon the deal.
And though his pals are now millionaires, Hill-Scott designs websites for the Government.
Reynolds, now SwiftKey chief executive, and Medlock, its chief technological officer, revealed the Microsoft deal on their website, and thanked those who had stuck by them along the way.
They said in a joint statement: ‘At times like this, people tend to focus on founders. However, the heart of our company is the awesome team who chose to share this journey with us.
‘We want to take this opportunity to thank them for their dedication and hard work.
‘We never would have come this far without you.’
Reynolds and Medlock were aged just 22 and 28 respectively when they came up with the app’s algo- rithm as an answer to their growing frustration with touch-screen keypads which garbled words.
Their technology, which uses artificial intelligence, now features on more than 300m devices worldwide and is licensed by some of the biggest mobile brands, including Samsung.
They have a team of 150 staff with offices in London, San Francisco and Seoul, in South Korea.
Since launching SwiftKey, Reynolds and Medlock have also helped Stephen Hawking to upgrade his computer-generated voice by applying predictive language software to his system and enabling him to speak faster and continue to give lectures.
SwiftKey works by understanding how words fit together in context and by continually learning to improve its knowledge.
This means it can predict your next word when typing, but also radically improves the accuracy of auto- correcting words when you mistype. The app lets you type by sliding your fingers across the screen, which can speed things up. It can also store your preferences online so they can be used on all your gadgets, and is constantly updated with phrases as new words become popular. It even remembers slang and nicknames which are preferred by the user.
The company estimates its software has saved its users 10 trillion keystrokes, which amounts to more than 100,000 years of typing time.
SwiftKey’s acquisition is the latest in a trend of huge US companies buying up British artificial intelligence ventures.
Google bought DeepMind for £400m – a programme which develops artificial intelligence for computer games in 2014. And last year Apple bought VocalIQ, which makes software to help computers and people c onverse more naturally.
Reynolds said: ‘ The UK has become a great place to build a tech business.’
Swiftkey has said Hill-Scott left the company on good terms. HillScott did not respond to a request for comment.