Swae fetches C$750k in seed round led by Eisenman family

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup that provides organizations with an idea management and decision-making platform, has raised C$750,000 in seed financing. The round was led by the Eisenman family, with participation from Global Market Enterprises, Tres Monos Capital, VentureSouq, Cordelia Capital and several angel investors.

PRESS RELEASE

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA (PRWEB) JANUARY 07, 2022
Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup that provides organizations with an idea management and decision-making platform, announces the close of a $750K CAD seed funding round – a 50% increase from the initial $500K offer – to help further its mission of giving everyone a voice, and allowing organizations to uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

Swae’s end-to-end idea management and decision-making solution uses a proprietary process to turn voices into decision-ready solutions for organizations, delivering real value for all kinds of customers.

Over the past 12 months, the results from implementing Swae for various clients speak for themselves:
$1M USD average value of innovation ideas revealed over 12 months
50% increase in sourcing investable decisions
3 month payback period

70% increase in engagement (compared to other experiments and efforts to date)
The funding will help the company expand its tech-stack, increase its feature offerings and integrations, and explore new areas of AI while aggressively ramping up its go-to-market and global presence, with the goal of servicing new clients in the North American and UK markets.

“We’re grateful to our investors – small and large – for helping us create a future where inclusion and bottom-up decision-making will be a source of competitive advantage,” says Soushiant Zanganehpour, Swae’s Founder & CEO. ”We have a shared vision of helping organizations dramatically improve engagement, source unrevealed solutions, and quickly adapt to changing external circumstances. Our thanks go to William Eisenman (his son Eugene and their Family Office), Global Market Enterprises, Tres Monos Capital, VentureSouq (Conscious Collective Fund), Cordelia Capital alongside many strategic angels and senior executives from Fortune 500 companies.”

THE FUTURE OF WORK & NEED FOR SWAE
The world has changed irreversibly over the last two years – the unexpected and continuous interruption brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic (and all subsequent mutations) combined with powerful social and technological forces have dramatically reshaped the workplace for the long term.

Remote working is increasingly the “new norm”, peer-to-peer collaboration has been digitized, inclusion and diversity have transformed into must-haves in today’s workplace, and many organizations continue to struggle with digitally transforming processes while maintaining engagement through this turbulent period. Furthermore, talented employees are increasingly willing to leave jobs and industries that have too often treated them as dispensable or excluded them from meaningful changes and decisions inside the workplace.
During this period of long term instability and uncertainty, employees increasingly want more transparency around decisions, and want to be heard in their workplace.

Unfortunately the current set of options provided to them to have a voice – including surveys, polls, and the like – fall significantly short on fulfilling their demands. Leveraging the wisdom of Steve Jobs on this topic, “to retain the best employees, organizations have to be run by ideas, not hierarchies,” and have to demonstrate that ideas can turn into action. The best managers and organizations will want to create systems to listen and reveal bottom-up ideas while turning them into appropriate solutions so they can reap the rewards. The best ideas have to win.

As competition for talent intensifies in today’s climate, and social and technology forces continue converging to disrupt organizations and workflows daily, organizations must embrace new concepts and technologies to adapt to the times. Companies and investors are eager for solutions that can help organizations adapt quickly to these ever-changing conditions and facilitate leadership on these issues.

SWAE’S TRACTION & IMPACT
Swae’s platform is well positioned to support organizations in these turbulent times, improving the traditional way organizations problem-solve, allowing them to crowdsource and leverage the hidden solutions using the knowledge and wisdom from within by providing a bottom-up approach that fuels innovation to tackle our increasingly complex landscape.

While every organization needs innovation and inclusion capabilities, successful customers are those who are looking to combat disruption with innovative ideas, want transparency and equity in decision making and are looking to increase inclusivity within. Swae is proud to have already implemented its platform with the many forward-thinking organizations, a few of which include LifeLabs, EMC Insurance, Etihad Airways, the United Nations, and Bosch.

Swae customer LifeLabs is Canada’s largest provider of community laboratory services with over 5,700 employees across Canada.

“Given the circumstances [of Covid-19] that we couldn’t get together as one team physically, Swae gave us the necessary tools to bring all of our teams together in one place to generate ideas, improve ideas collaboratively, and vote on the best ideas, to put forward some tangible and actionable outcomes from the process,” said Haleh Bahrami, VP of Lab Operations.

Creating an environment that facilitates and encourages employees to raise their voices underpins a healthy amount of employee engagement, which feeds natural occurring innovation inside any organization, and the chance to contribute to the innovation agenda in turn drives engagement, boosting productivity and performance. These are all part of a well-oiled flywheel or virtuous cycle – one cannot be achieved without the others.

As the link between employee voice, engagement, innovation and organizational performance becomes increasingly clear, companies and investors are eager to find solutions that can help organizations dramatically boost collaboration, source decision-ready solutions, and improve the pace of innovation.

While every organization needs innovation and inclusion capabilities, successful customers are those who are looking to combat disruption with innovative ideas from within, retaining their best talent and keeping engagement sky-high through a transparent, equitable, and inclusive process for decision-making.