TouchType, the developer of the excellent SwiftKey predictive typing app, has secured a £275,000 investment from Octopus Investments. The deal with TouchType represents the 19th investment Octopus has concluded this year and is one of Octopus’s first seed investments.

TouchType’s core product is the Fluency Prediction Engine, which can boost user writing efficiency by up to 50 per cent compared to a standard QWERTY keyboard. By using advanced natural language processing techniques, Fluency is able to predict what a user intends to write with a high level of accuracy. The company intends to use its expertise from within the natural language processing and machine learning fields to continue developing its prediction technology and enhance its position of technical leadership.

TouchType began trading in August 2008 and has made impressive progress, securing its first contract with a phone manufacturer earlier this year, with negotiations with other manufacturers under way. Its consumer keyboard app SwiftKey was downloaded over 250,000 times during a two-month beta. The full version of the app was launched on September 23 and has been the top paid app on Googles Android Market ever since, seeing over 50,000 sales.

“TouchType is at the leading edge of next generation predictive text entry, a market that is growing rapidly,” says Octupus’s Jo Oliver, who led the deal. “From the outset, we have been impressed by the vision, talent and enthusiasm of the founders. TouchType is exactly the kind of innovative business into which Octopus is seeking to make seed capital investments, with further funds earmarked for follow-on funding to enable TouchType to realise its full potential.”