Our Investment Thesis in Fleksy
Your smartphone can do countless things, from shooting an award-winning movie to sending a hefty bank transfer. Predicting Alzheimer, anyone? Thingthing Ltd, Inveready’s newest portfolio addition and second UK investment, is a sector agnostic technology provider that enables innovation through smartphones. The team founded by Olivier, Xevi and Francesc developed the powerful Fleksy SDK that lets any company create a fully customizable and secure virtual keyboard for Android and iOS.
Inveready invested in a multi-use unique Intellectual Property with very creative monetization methods. The AI and NLP-backed algorithms (autocorrection, next word prediction, swipe typing…), data collection mechanisms, security aspects or even the fully customizable design (colors, layout, add-ons…) can be monetized, separately or in groups. In the mid-term, we foresee millions of end users having the Fleksy SDK running on their phone or tablet. How will Fleksy reach them? Two ways:
1- B2B IP Licensing:
Building a non-laggy, bug-free and blackbox-free virtual keyboard for both Android and iOS is heavily difficult and expensive in time and money. Most customers tried and failed, until they bought a license to use Fleksy’s 100% owned IP.
Example of use cases:
Telemedicine: Exclusively for Health clients, the SDK enables organizations to reliably collect millions of data points in real-time. These data points are used to feed algorithms that monitor and detect potential diseases and disorders ubiquitously and unobtrusively via smartphones & tablets. A process known as Active Digital Phenotyping. Data collected (and not sent to Fleksy servers) describes the user’s typing cadence.
Some clinical and commercial use cases: mental health monitoring, efficiency of a drug or treatment against a neurodegenerative disease, prediction of a stroke or a neurodegenerative disease.
Advertisement and rewards: You’re a reward company or a charity, have a large user community and want to monetize the 8.4 hours per week each user spends on a mobile device. Here is an idea: a keyboard within the users’ browser: the user barely types “Ni” and the Fleksy-backed keyboard pops a special non-intrusive discount for Nike shoes on a retailer’s website, or even a Nike mini-app embedded in the keyboard. Google is shaking in the corner.
Banking and payments: Banks and fintechs can include, within their mobile app, a secure keyboard to avoid password theft (keylogging). The keyboard reinforces “in-app protection” and can hardly be replicated in case the bank app is reverse engineered and redistributed for phishing purposes. More? The bank customers could send payments (or crypto!) directly from their keyboard while chatting across any messaging app .
Android OEMs: A big phone, tablet or wearable manufacturer such as Samsung would not mind paying Google Gboard or Microsoft Swiftkey‘s hefty fees to have its new devices shipped with their keyboards, but for low-end manufacturers, each cent counts. The latter would love to have one of the best Android keyboards as a default keyboard and at a low price. Also, with antitrust regulators fining Google for abusing market dominance, such as $177M in South Korea this September, those big manufacturers should feel freer to shy away from Google and pick different options for keyboard customization (shake again, Google!)
2- B2B2C Adtech Marketplace:
It uses the same popping system mentioned above, but the app distribution is different. The public and commercial Fleksy app is either downloaded (Appstore, Playstore…) or preinstalled by OEMs. Brands can connect to their potential customers via the public keyboard at a cost-per-click much cheaper than Google Ads (shake again, Google!), and can also develop their own popping mini-app to be included in the keyboard, for instant distribution across messengers (Whatsapp, Telegram…).
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the team has done an incredible work in developing its own niche market, and already has big names as customers. Inveready is thrilled to have led the £1M+ round in the company that is providing the backbone tech for a new generation of mobile apps, as well as to be joined by historical investors Simile Venture Partners and SOSV.
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