Seattle startup TravellingWave Inc. has raised an undisclosed round of Series A financing from angels for its speech recognition software. Instead of relying solely on speech recognition, TravellingWave combines predictive text with speech recognition to make text messaging over mobile devices faster. Ashwin Rao, the CEO of TravellingWave, tells Tech Confidential he chose to focus on predictive text, which offers up suggestions of words as soon as the first letter is typed, because pure speech recognition doesn't work quickly enough. Using TravellingWave's software, someone can say a word and type the first letter, and get a result quickly.
Rao has spent 15 years in the speech recognition world, and he believes TravellingWave will not compete directly against the larger players in the market, such as Microsoft Corp., Nuance Communications Inc. and Google Inc. who are making bets on voice mobile search. He hopes to license the software to a handset maker or carrier, and he says the funding will also allow the company to launch the software as a download available to all device holders.
Angels participating in the round include Jim Judson, a partner Seattle law firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP; Geoff Entress, a principal with Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group; Bill Miller, formerly with OVP Ventures and a former general manager of Microsoft’s Advertising Business Unit; and Colin Wong, founder of investment firm Prosperati and formerly with Google. The angel round adds to a total of $150,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation. Rao reports that the NSF grants made it possible for the company to stick with angels for its Series A round, rather than knock on the doors of VC firms. TravellingWave's first product should be out within a year, at which point the company will likely seek additional funding. Given the consolidation happening among speech recognition players, TravellingWave may become a target. —Stacey Higginbotham
See TravellingWave press release (.pdf)
See March 14 story from TheDeal.com
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