How Typewise got into YC after pivoting to B2B productivity
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- 01 Sep 2022
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Swiss startup Typewise is showing the power of sticking at it: The team behind patented text prediction technology — whose fascination with typing productivity started off as a consumer keyboard-focused side hustle more than five years ago — has gained backing from Y Combinator and will be in the cohort pitching to investors during the accelerator’s Summer 2022 demo day early next month.
Typewise won a spot in YC (and its standard $500,000 backing) after pivoting to fully focus on the B2B market — aiming to serve demand for typing productivity gains in areas like customer service and sales, per co-founder David Eberle.
“Last year we realized where this makes most sense,” he tells TechCrunch. “Consumers type a few sentences here and there in WhatsApp and they don’t really care too much about being 20% or 30% faster or making one or two typos less. But businesses — especially where there’s a lot of writing happening, like in customer service and sales — that’s where even single digit percentages matter a lot and double digit even more.”
“Because it’s customer-facing communication then also quality matters a lot — because it can impact a brand’s reputation as well,” he adds. “So that, in the end, got us into YC.”
Back in 2020, Typewise raised what it billed at the time as a seed — of $1 million — but Eberle confirms it’s now classing that as more a pre-seed and will be looking to raise a fresh seed when it pitches investors in September.
Despite shifting full focus onto B2B, Typewise’s consumer app — which has gained some 2 million+ downloads — was not wasted effort for the team. It helped them “fine-tune” their AI models, per Eberle — which in turn led it to be able to file a second patent, earlier this year, for technology that can predict entire sentences not just next words. Read More…
