Proptech Startup SwiftConnect Closes $17M Series A Round
Physical access control platform gets boost from major real estate tech investors
BY PHILIP RUSSO OCTOBER 26, 2022 8:30 AM
Physical access control company SwiftConnect announced Wednesday that it has closed a $17 million Series A round led by JLL Spark Global Ventures and Navitas Capital.
Bridge Investment Group, Crow Holdings, Jamf, Nuveen Real Estate, World Trade Ventures and 1414 Ventures also participated in the round.
Stamford, Conn.-based SwiftConnect plans to use the funds to further scale its customer base, professional services and engineering teams, as well as to expand into Europe and Australia.
Having originally intended to raise $10 million in the Series A round, SwiftConnect ultimately decided to increase the closing amount to $17 million, based on having to scale up operations to meet customer interest in the company, said Chip Kruger, co-founder of SwiftConnect. The general economic uncertainty and its potential impact on the company’s markets also influenced the decision.
“The serendipity of doing the bigger deal was we had a lot of investor interest from some household names, so that larger size also allowed us to accommodate all those people,” Kruger said.
SwiftConnect, which automates credentials across different buildings and office spaces to make them easier to access, is seeing a shift in who handles building entry for enterprise ownership, said Matt Kopel, the company’s co-founder.
“People are coming back, but they’re not coming back five days a week,” said Kopel. “And they’re not coming to the same spot every single time. They’re going to different locations at different times. They need something that allows them to get into these different locations when they need or want to.
“From what we could tell, not necessarily on the property management but on the enterprise side, security technology and thus the operation of access control is increasingly coming underneath the CISO, the chief information security officer, and the IT department. It’s like cyber defense.”
That shift occurred after COVID. Before that, security operations and technology generally came under the purview of a company’s head of security or head of real estate. The result is that users and investors now see greater value in SwiftConnect, added Kopel.
“The desire for IT departments inside enterprises to operate physical security in the same way with the same mechanisms and the same audit controls as they operate in the digital and logical security of their software tools have converged, as has hybrid work at the same time,” said Kopel. “I think it’s given us a lot of momentum.”
The company’s lead investors in the Series A round agreed via statements.
“SwiftConnect continues to increase momentum at an exponential pace, and the Series A financing will help solidify their position of being the de facto network for accessing and enabling intelligent, flexible workplaces,” said Laurent Grill, partner at JLL Spark Global Ventures.
“Since Navitas Capital first invested, SwiftConnect has become the standard utility for access control amongst owners, operators and occupiers of commercial real estate,” said Travis Putnam, managing partner at Navitas Capital. “The incredible team and innovative platform have helped forge partnerships with major technology customers and drive successful deployments across many major owner portfolios and enterprise office fleets. We are excited to see that this new capital allows continued execution of SwiftConnect.”
The Series A funding comes on the heels of SwiftConnect winning CREtech NYC’s Emerging Startup Grand Prize and partnering with Microsoft.
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
