Scottish tech start-up, Swipii, raises £2 million to help empower small local businesses
GLASGOW-based Swipii, the leading loyalty and marketing CRM suite for small businesses, has recently raised £2 million through new investor funding.
The new funding allows Swipii to continue with its accelerated 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.
Founded in 2014, Swipii is recognised as the first automated marketing suite built to solve a multi-billion pound problem faced today by small ‘brick and mortar’ retail businesses.
Chitresh Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Swipii, says: “Swipii works with a large number of businesses, including barber shops, beauty salons and coffee shops and often they suffer from poor levels of customer data collection due to a lack of time and resources, which leads to the second problem of no follow-up communication to help increase repeat visits and drive customer loyalty.
“Our vision is for Swipii to become the sales force of hyperlocal retail. We want to give the power of systems such as big store loyalty cards to small and medium-sized retail businesses at a price that delivers a better ROI and significantly increases revenue for their business.”
Swipii’s own data backs up the importance of customer loyalty, with customer visits increasing by as much as 44 per cent when a loyalty programme is present, and 80 per cent of a company’s revenue coming from 20 per cent of its loyal customers.
Recently, Swipii announced a key strategic contract with Cordia, one of Scotland’s largest providers of catering services, to encourage and reward school pupils to eat healthier options at lunchtime.
Now, 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.
Louis Schena, COO and co-founder of Swipii, said: “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.”
Swipii is currently in discussions to install their platform at 200 additional schools, aiming to help solve the problem of unhealthy eating and obesity in school children.
A recent Royal Society for Public Health study found that 78 per cent of young people believe that a loyalty card that gives points for healthy food choices should be made available.
Swipii are looking to penetrate even more of the 25,000 secondary schools across the UK.
With additional partnerships with six universities across the UK – the latest being Newcastle University – Swipii’s current user base of 410,000 is expected to continue its rapid growth towards 2,000,000 within the next 12 months.
To meet objectives, Swipii has recently grown staff numbers from seven to 43, adding some key roles in sales, marketing, product development and support.
Swipii now operate from two offices in Glasgow and London.
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