Nuance To Acquire Swype For $100+ Million
Nuance has acquired Seattle-based startup Swype for something more than $100 million, says a source with knowledge of the deal. — I'm a big fan of Swype, and this is a brilliant acquisition by Nuance. Swype first launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2008.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nuance is reportedly paying north of $100 million — AllThingsD pegs it at $102.5 million — for Swype, the Seattle startup whose drag-to-type keyboard debuted at a TechCrunch conference in 2008 and has since been preloaded across Android handsets. The deal is sourced, not confirmed by either company.
It slots into an aggressive year for Nuance: after playing hardball in voice-recognition licensing this spring and launching the Dragon Go voice-search app in July, the company is buying its way into the other half of mobile input — touch. Owning both gesture typing and dictation gives Nuance a claim on every way a user puts words into a phone.
First-order effects
- Swype's OEM preload deals now sit inside Nuance's portfolio, letting the company sell handset makers a single license covering swipe typing and Dragon-powered voice input instead of two separate technologies.
Second-order effects
- Independent keyboard makers such as SwiftKey suddenly look like the remaining acquisition targets in a category where Nuance has just set a nine-figure price benchmark, and OEMs facing Nuance's hardball licensing posture have fewer alternatives to bundle against.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile text input consolidates from a field of indie apps into licensed IP controlled by a few large buyers, with keyboards valued less as consumer products than as data engines feeding prediction and speech models.
The trend: Smartphone input methods are consolidating through acquisition as voice and gesture displace plain tapping as the basis of mobile interaction.