As flexible workspaces grow, nearly 40% of companies adopt smartphone-based authentication for employee access to office buildings
An example of a company that has profited from this boom is SwiftConnect, which sells a platform for managing access to real workplaces. Chip Kruger and Matt Kopel established the company in the year 2020, following the sale of their previous business, Waltz, to WeWork on the previous year.
Kopel stated that he came up with the concept for SwiftConnect while he was working at WeWork, which he did for a short period of time after the Waltz acquisition.
He thought that the on-demand access management that WeWork desired, which was centered on mobile devices, was going to become the standard for many offices in the future.
SwiftConnect’s framework is intended to make access management for office spaces significantly more abstract. When employees make use of the service, they are able to add their employee badge to either Apple Wallet or Google Wallet on their mobile devices.
After it has been added, the digital badge permits them to enter their building and shared amenity spaces, provided that the door locks are equipped with NFC technology.
Admins can grant credentials to employees from a dashboard, allowing them to enter only rooms that have been approved.
When it comes to a mobile-centric access control management platform, SwiftConnect is not the first company to bring it to market. Software is available from a variety of companies, including Openpath, Kisi, and Verkada, that allows users to replace physical access cards with personal devices.
On the other hand, Kruger claims that SwiftConnect is one of the few readers that does not necessitate the installation of new reader hardware by businesses.
Kruger stated that this has been essential in the company’s success in acquiring clients such as Silverstein Properties, the owner of 7 World Trade Center in New York City.
SwiftConnect, which asserts that its system is operational in more than one hundred million square feet of office space, stated in the previous year that it did not anticipate the need to seek additional financing “unless strategic opportunities presented themselves.”
It would appear that such prospects for strategic maneuvering presented themselves. The Series B funding round that SwiftConnect completed this month brought in a total of $37 million.
Quadri Ventures was the lead investor in the round, while other investors included HID, Egis Capital Partners, Klingenstein Fields Advisors, Crow Holdings, JLL Spark, Navitas Capital, and Spring Rock Capital.
According to Kruger, “We decided to raise more than enough funding to weather any upcoming economic storms in order to address any potential headwinds that may arise.”
According to Kopel, the new resources, which increase the entire amount of capital raised by the firm to $74 million, will be utilized to expand the company’s workforce to 135 individuals and expand into new geographic areas. There are currently offices for SwiftConnect located in both Montreal and Stamford.
Additionally, strategic acquisitions are possible; for example, SwiftConnect utilized a piece of its war chest to purchase Detrios, a company specializing in access control, in the previous year.
“SwiftConnect is expanding our expertise into the high-end, multi-family rental market, and we have executed deployments in this space,” Kruger said. “We are very excited about this opportunity.”
“We are assisting in the facilitation of self-service and unrestricted access to parking garages, buildings, turnstiles, office suites, and amenity spaces for tenants across their portfolio of properties,”
SwiftConnect is experiencing some headwinds, although it is expanding at a good clip. If employees’ smartphones become inoperable, mobile-centric access control solutions may place them in a precarious position. In addition, privacy concerns have been raised regarding systems such as SwiftConnect’s.
According to an article published by Business Insider, companies such as PwC, Amazon, and Goldman Sachs are utilizing badges to keep track of the places where their workers are working. The results of a recent poll indicate that 62 percent of companies want to implement badge swipes as a means of tracking attendance.
SwiftConnect will be responsible for demonstrating that it is capable of providing convenience without engaging in excessive surveillance.
According to Kruger, “Our platform is built on the principle of privacy-by-design,” which means that we only gather the bare minimum of user information that is required to run the service. All of our clients continue to exercise complete authority over the user data that we process on their behalf.
