Swipii, a startup providing a loyalty, marketing and customer relationship management suite for small businesses has raked in $2.5 million in funding. The chief investors included LocalGlobe, Global Founders Capital and Kima Ventures.
With the funding, Swipii will accelerate its growth plans of empowering thousands of small businesses across the UK, expanding from its current base of merchants to a projected 4,500 merchants in 2017.
Swipii had its beginnings in Glasgow in 2014. Its vision is simple but effective – it aims to help small bricks and mortar retail businesses improve customer data collection and drive repeat visits. It accomplishes this by positioning a customer-facing iPad next to the point of sale to capture customer information.
The customer is then issued a loyalty card and can then download the app, both of which are ways to gain discounts and rewards at any merchant signed up to the Swipii platform. Merchants can also benefit, using the platform to send out marketing emails and track real-time customer data, using methods such as visiting history and rewarding redemptions.
Chitresh Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Swipii, said,
Our vision is for Swipii to become the Salesforce.com of hyperlocal retail. We want to give the power of systems such as Tesco’s Clubcard to small and medium sized retail businesses at a price that delivers a better ROI and significantly increases revenue for their business.
Swipii claims to have just over 1,000 merchants under its belt and now hopes to use this new funding to step up to 4,500 merchants by 2017. The company recently partnered with Cordia, Scotland’s largest provider of catering services, with the objective of encouraging and rewarding school pupils into eating healthier options at lunchtime. After a three-month pilot scheme at a secondary school in the Southside of Glasgow, all 30 secondary schools in Glasgow have Swipii on their premises.
The firm is in discussions to install their platform at 200 additional schools, aiming to help solve the problem of unhealthy eating and obesity in school children. It is looking to penetrate even more of the 25,000 secondary schools across the UK, with its current user base of 410,000 expected to reach a target 2,000,000 within the next 12 months.
Louis Schena, COO and co-founder, equally enthusiastic at the new possibilities, commented,
We are all really excited to be launching Swipii across schools in Glasgow and delighted to be working alongside Cordia on this project. They are a great example of a catering provider showing innovation and keeping up to date with relevant technologies.
