| Total | $8M |
| Angel, 3/07 Mark Stabingas Timothy Biltz | $1.5M |
| Series A, 6/08 Sunbridge Partners Harbert Management Corporation Pittco Management | $6.5M |
Yap provides voice-to-text conversion for mobile phones, using an advanced form of speech recognition. Users can say anything they want and the Yap Platform will send back a textual representation. As a bonus, the service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them, and then sending them back out; a boon for your privacy. They also have a text messaging application called Yap9 that allows you to quickly keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Beyond that, users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keypads.
Two brothers, Igor and Victor Jablokov, were inspired to create the service after hearing about their kid sister dangerously texting on her phone while driving (66% of teens do this!). The team behind the service has also worked on Apple’s iPod, Honda’s navigational systems, and IBM’s ViaVoice.
As their platform can support a number of use cases, from messaging to voice search and voicemail-to-text, so does the number of companies they overlap with this innovation. Their primary competitors in this space include Tellme Networks, recently acquired by Microsoft, and Vlingo, recently funded by Yahoo. Other competitors include Jott, PhoneTag, and SpinVox, who all use a combination of automation and humans to convert your voicemails into text. Messaging competitors include Sequoia’s Bubble Motion and KPCB’s Pinger, although they only allow you to send audio files to your recipients without conversion into text.
| Website | yapme.com |
| Launch Date | September 17, 2007 |
| Tags | voice-to-text |
Yap9 is a unified mobile client that connects to the Yap freeform speech recognition platform. It contains a threaded text messaging application that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers in realtime: by simply saying something, your words will then be converted into text within seconds, and sent out. Additionally, it unifies the mobile web by allowing you to instantly access web services just by talking. You can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, or interact with Facebook without having to type on your phone’s miniature keypad.
