Qeexo picks up $4.5 million for novel touch technology

Touch technology allows you to tap with a finger, nail, knuckle, stylus, and eraser

Qeexo, a company providing novel interaction experiences for mobile and other touch devices, today announced that it has raised $4.5 million in Series B funding led by KTB Network with participation from Inventec, Sierra Ventures, and Danhua Capital.

Two years ago, the company raised $2.9 million in Series A funding from Sierra Ventures and Danhua Capital.

If you’ve ever wondered why your smartphone is only smart enough to tell the difference between one finger and two fingers, then you’re not alone. Qeexo has explored and developed new ways of interacting with touchscreen devices in order to widen the array of actions you can take.

FingerSense, the company’s flagship solution, can differentiate between five distinct manners of tapping the screen: with the pad of your finger (the one most of us use today), with your knuckle, with your nail, with a stylus, or with an “eraser” on the back of the stylus.

The idea is not to just simply give users more ways of touching the screen for the sake of having more ways of touching the screen, but rather to allow for different kinds of actions depending on the interaction.

For example, a tap of the finger over a body of text may select a single word, a tap of the nail may select a whole paragraph, and a tap of the knuckle may select the entire body. That’s just an example I made up, but it illustrates how different OS makers and app developers could creatively utilize the technology to give users better and easier access to context menus or other actions available in their environment.

The company says FingerSense is platform agnostic because it is installed at the OS level, but most of the company’s implementations appear to be on Android devices. I reached out to the company to see if there have been any uses of FingerSense on iOS yet but they're unable to share any such implementations.

“We believe Qeexo’s exceptional development team is creating the next-generation experience that will transform the way we all interact on a variety of screens everywhere,” said Chunsoo Kim of KTB Network in a prepared statement.

Qeexo says its technology is already deployed on millions of mobile devices worldwide, thanks to some high profile partnerships.

Huawei, the world's second largest manufacturer of Android phones (after Samsung and neck and neck with Lenovo), has featured FingerSense on millions of its smartphones. Additionally, YunOS, a smartphone operating system based on Android developed by a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, has integrated FingerSense into its platform.

Qeexo will use its new funding to expand its hiring initiatives (particularly in engineering, product management), operations, and R&D.