Meet Olivier Plante, CEO at Fleksy Keyboard, Backed By Thingthing Ltd.

Thingthing Ltd. is the award-winning software keyboard company behind the Fleksy keyboard. For everyday consumers, the Fleksy keyboard for iOS and Android enables millions of users to type faster on the move. For 3rd party businesses, we provide the Fleksy SDK, a flexible and proven touchscreen typing toolkit on which many companies rely every day to enable high performance typing experiences. We’ve also now launched the Fleksy SDK Developers Platform that allows developers to test our tech for free.

What’s more is that we want to contribute to the development of the health and med-tech sector, so we’ve developed tech that enables the Fleksy keyboard to collect typing data that could help predict and prevent mental illnesses.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
In 2015, my co-founders and I decided to build a smarter text input solution for mobile devices – a software keyboard that would “be able to read the typer’s mind”, be intuitive and predictive. The keyboard had to enable fast typing by granting the typer access to more features and functions while messaging. We wanted to solve some common issues people face when typing (especially for those who are visually impaired) – like typos.

After growing on iOS and Android, we kept receiving requests from other businesses looking into leveraging our home-grown tech stack. Eventually this led to us building a powerful Software Development Kit (SDK) in order to help other companies build their own keyboard app faster, more reliably and with the benefit of a proven typing experience for demanding smartphone users.

We’re now focusing our attention towards making it easier for developers to build high performing software keyboards.
 

What do you think makes this company unique?

 
To name some, our uniqueness comes from several intricacies. Firstly, our technology is proprietary and built in-house (from scratch) which reassures any developer or company decision maker.

Secondly, we are private by design which is not the case with the current giants of our market, nor our immediate SDK competitors. And thirdly, our product is the world’s fastest touchscreen keyboard (GWR winner and still not dethroned).
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Like many startups, we’ve evolved a lot – turned our company upside down to find our product market fit. From being the first to introduce a neural network emoji prediction, hyper-contextual suggestions while typing and more, we’re now heavily focused on developing our technology so other businesses can benefit from it.

By providing our Fleksy SDK to app developers and enterprises across multiple industries, we’re able to not only provide our expertise but also shape a better text typing future.
 

What can we hope to see from Fleksy in the future?

 
The Fleksy team follows a common vision where typing on any touchscreen in future will be on Fleksy technologies. We have exciting new developments in the pipeline – currently we’re working on improving the sales cycle for developers, so that high performing typing experiences can follow.