FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT

Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

6 January 2022 | For Immediate Release

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 month
– 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 and 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 and 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. 

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.

Investor Testimonials

“It is imperative for all organizations to reflect on the importance of their workforce and company culture. The rise of employee activism, and recent, very public, examples have shown the demand for more purposeful cultures have grown louder and the adverse outcomes that arise when management fails to acknowledge such, can be detrimental. 

The Swae team has built a powerful tech-enabled product to meet this “future of work” that is required while driving innovation at the same time. All by providing employees the opportunity to voice their ideas in a coherent and structured manner, bringing value that has been thus far overlooked to the fore.”

Sonia Weymuller, Founding Partner Venture Souq VC and Conscious Collective Fund

“As a fellow business owner consistently focused on empowering everyone, I couldn’t help but resonate with a product that addresses a large problem I see in the workforce.   When an organization chooses to listen to its people, the results are extraordinary – from retention, attracting diverse talent to impacting the bottom line by being adaptable to disruption and change. Swae levels the playing field giving everyone a voice in an efficient, transparent way through a channel that should exist within all organizations.”

Alisa Kolodizner, Chief Founding Partner, Cordelia Capital 

“I invested in Swae as I believe it revolutionizes organizational decision-making and how those decisions are implemented, while revitalizing employee engagement, buy-in and trust. Many people don’t share their ideas because they don’t know how to formulate them or where to start. Swae has the potential to change how governments, businesses and non-profits make decisions.“

Kia Afshari, Product Management Director at Visier

“I invested in Swae  because it gives everyone in an organization a chance to participate, in an honest and open way. C-level executives need to be focused on where to go, and that sometimes disconnects them from the people delivering their vision, they need a tool like this to help them uncover the operational bottlenecks that their staff have to work through on a daily basis. If leadership is truly committed to providing visibility, improving operations, and maximizing staff retention, then they need honest feedback from their staff, I believe that Swae can do this”.

Don Sherrah, Business Development Manager at Deloitte

“The current use of Swae, working within larger firms, helps remove layers of bureaucracy and provides a much needed voting system and level of transparency that is often missing. An employee survey just doesn’t do the job anymore and Swae provides a voice to those that need to be heard the most”

Ashkan Golkar, Vice President, RBC Dominion Securities

“I invested in Swae because I know there’s a need to harness the power of everyone within companies.”

Martin Ertl, CEO at Recital Software

“Collective intelligence can lead to better outcomes in organizations than our current silos and bureaucracy. With a world rapidly incorporating AI into everything, most applications seek to cut the human out of the process– what I appreciate about Swae is that it seeks to augment rather than replace human input.”

Emerson Perez, Sr Informatics Lead at Aetna

“I’ve spent so many hours trying to orchestrate ways to get insights that were locked up in my previous teams. If we had had a tool like Swae, I think the outcomes for our company would have been far better.”

Kahran Singh, General Partner at Tres Monos Capital

 Boilerplate

Swae is an idea management and decision-making platform that reveals solutions to problems directly from employees or stakeholder groups.

Founded in 2018, in Vancouver Canada, Swae’s platform disrupts the traditional hierarchy found within large organizations and provides a transparent and inclusive hub for ideation and collaboration. The combination of collective intelligence, AI and anonymity provide the foundation for users to provide critical feedback, improve ideas and vote on which ones move forward.

Organizations around the world use Swae to brings all voices to the table so they can uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

For more information, visit www.swae.io or contact Swae’s Media Relations Team here.

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