London: One of the three founders of the app that can predict the next word you want to write using artificial intelligence, missed out on a whopping 25 million pounds after selling his stake for a bicycle.
Chris Hill-Scott, a 29-year-old from Buckinghamshire, founded the startup called Swiftkey in 2008 with two friends, Jon Reynolds, 30, and Ben Medlock, 26, that was sold to Microsoft yesterday for 174 million pounds ($250 million).
However, Chris won't see a penny because two months after the company was founded he sold all his shares - for a bike, the report said.
Chris, a University of Reading graduate, tweeted yesterday that his decision eight years ago to sell stakes was "the biggest mistake I ever made".
Jon and Ben are about to become millionaires after SwiftKey, a predictive text service, was bought by Microsoft.
A SwiftKey spokeswoman said Chris had "left on good terms". "When SwiftKey was founded there were three founding members, Chris was a friend of Jon from school and Ben was a friend from his University in Cambridge. Two months after forming the company Chris decided to leave; Jon and Ben bought his shares," she said.
SwiftKey uses "artificial intelligence" by learning a user's writing patterns over time, to better predict the words they might use next, regarded as one of the best in the world.
The technology has been used by Stephen Hawking to speed up his computer-generated voice and has been installed on more than 300 million tablets across the world.
The SwiftKey app is available for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Apple's iOS.
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