Microsoft to Acquire Swiftkey at $250 Million

Globally acclaimed tech giant Microsoft is paving a way to get a firm hold on the not so researched Artificial Intelligence field and to also expand its presence in the mobile space and for doing so, it is applying its best market strategies to have successful collaborations with all major companies which it finds suitable for the same.

As a part of the same approach, Microsoft is now planning to acquire the most popular predictive keyboard app maker SwiftKey. Though the announcement is yet to be made public which reports claim won't take long. Financial Times reports that Microsoft is paying a hefty sum of $250 million to purchase the London-based startup and also adds that Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock, the co-founders of SwiftKey, will get $30 million each as part of the collaboration.

SwiftKey has always been a keyboard maker, but it made headlines when it was surfaced that Stephen Hawking's wheelchair too uses the same Artificial Intelligence technology so as to assist him in the process of speaking and writing.

Unlike other makers, SwiftKey makes use of machine learning technology and calls it Artificial Intelligence, offering the users predictive word suggestions. It is used by more than 300 million users that mark their presence on all popular mobile platforms like Android and iOS, but not Windows Phone.

Satya Nadella got appointed as Microsoft CEO back in February 2014, and that was a turning point for the tech market as Microsoft shifted its gaze from just its own platform to other widely available platforms in all major sectors acquiring a number of apps and services along with the startup companies. The collaboration is also seen as an attempt of Microsoft to mark its foothold in the eyes of Android and iOS users since its Windows Phone did not get hype Microsoft expected it would.

Alongside collaborating with startup companies in the past two years, Microsoft has also purchased Acompli, an email app, which it utilised to remake the Outlook email client on both Android and iOS, and further also purchased Wunderlist (a to-do list app), and Sunrise (a calendar app).