Mobile speech-to-text company TravellingWave has officially launched and announced its first round of funding. The round was led by Jim Judson, a partner at Seattle law firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and joined by investors including Geoff Entress, a principal with Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group; Bill Miller, formerly with OVP Ventures and a former general manager of Microsoft’s Advertising Business Unit, and Colin Wong, founder of investment firm Prosperati and formerly with Google… The amount of the investment was undisclosed.

TravellingWave has technology dubbed “predictive speech-to-text” which combines both voice recognition and predictive text to create words on a mobile handset—eg VoicePredict, which when installed lets the user speak a word while depressing the left soft key (VoicePredict button), type in a letter or two of that word, and the word automatically appears on the screen. The company was founded by Dr. Ashwin Rao, an international expert in speech recognition who has held research positions at leading companies, including AT&T Bell-Labs and Dragon Systems (now Nuance), software developers Gregory Aronov and Marat Garafutdinov (formerly with Conversay and Microsoft) and mobile industry business development executive Joseph O’Neill (formerly with Motorola).