STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 14, 2024--
SwiftConnect today announced the closing of a $37 million Series B financing to expand its access network for connecting people to the right place at the right time. The company’s latest investment round is led by Quadri Ventures, with participation from new investors HID (part of ASSA ABLOY), Egis Capital Partners, and Klingenstein Fields Advisors. Returning investors include Crow Holdings, JLL Spark, Navitas Capital, Tanzola Corp., and Spring Rock Capital. In addition to expanding the company’s access network, the funding will be used to scale operations, drive geographic expansion, and support new product initiatives. SwiftConnect has raised $74 million in total funding to date.
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“We are thrilled to make a significant further investment in SwiftConnect, recognizing the company’s innovative solution for physical access, driven management team, and viral market adoption with major enterprise brands and real estate customers,” said Chris James, Managing Partner atQuadri Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on enterprise software. “We are fully committed to supporting SwiftConnect’s next phase of growth as we embrace its transformative vision of being the global network for access to everything people need, when they need it.”
SwiftConnect’s success is grounded in its ability to automate, centralize and digitize access management, user provisioning, and credential lifecycle management. This gives people the freedom to use their mobile access pass in NFC wallets and any other credentials to conveniently access buildings, offices and enterprise resources, amenities, and much more–regardless of the existing access control, identity management and building systems in place.
“Our Series B fundraise signals strong and ongoing investor confidence in SwiftConnect as we continue to reshape the physical access paradigm,” said Co-CEOs Chip Kruger and Matt Kopel of SwiftConnect. “As the network that powers a hassle-free experience for accessing places, spaces and things, SwiftConnect combines our vast partner ecosystem and vendor-neutral SaaS platform with our customer base of multinational organizations, iconic commercial real estate properties and portfolios, and other organizations to deliver the future of truly connected access and identity management. The new funding will continue to drive our leadership position in making seamless and secure access to anywhere possible so people can more easily access the most important things in their lives.”
SwiftConnect is live in hundreds of millions of square feet across multiple types of customers and vertical markets, globally. The company’s current customer base represents a potential opportunity of over a billion square feet of office space and more than two million users. SwiftConnect’s market traction includes:
Following on from SwiftConnect’s acquisition of Detrios, the company recently purchased UK-based FlitchTech to expand its ability to provide highly complex access control integration services across multiple continents, while increasing its footprint in the higher education vertical. SwiftConnect has also extended its expertise into the high-end multifamily rental market and has completed deployments in North America.
Supporting Quotes
The company’s momentum is powered by its AccessCloud platform, the backbone of the SwiftConnect access network. Built for interoperability, the SaaS platform integrates mobile wallets, credential technologies, readers, locks and devices, access control systems, identity providers, and other business systems that govern physical access across multiple locations worldwide.
About SwiftConnect
SwiftConnect is the access network for connecting people to the right place at the right time. We delight users with elegant ways to interact with places, spaces and things by ensuring your digital pass is on your phone, watch or anywhere it needs to be. Powering connected access experiences for commercial real estate owners and enterprises across financial and professional services, life sciences, technology, and other leading organizations, our platform integrates with existing mobile platforms, credential technologies, and business systems to provide authorized access to everything, everywhere through centralized access management. We provide a street-to-seat journey that users love, automation that redefines operational efficiency, and a foundation of security and privacy that administrators trust so you can navigate your world better For more information, visit. www.swiftconnect.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
SwiftConnect Raises $37 Million of Financing in Series B Round
WASHINGTON (AP) — Those ever-present TV drug ads showing patients hiking, biking or enjoying a day at the beach could soon have a different look: New rules require drugmakers to be clearer and more direct when explaining their medications' risks and side effects.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration spent more than 15 years crafting the guidelines, which are designed to do away with industry practices that downplay or distract viewers from risk information.
Many companies have already adopted the rules, which become binding Nov. 20. But while regulators were drafting them, a new trend emerged: thousands of pharma influencers pushing drugs online with little oversight. A new bill in Congress would compel the FDA to more aggressively police such promotions on social media platforms.
“Some people become very attached to social media influencers and ascribe to them credibility that, in some cases, they don’t deserve,” said Tony Cox, professor emeritus of marketing at Indiana University.
Still, TV remains the industry's primary advertising format, with over $4 billion spent in the past year, led by blockbuster drugs like weight-loss treatment Wegovy, according to ispot.tv, which tracks ads.
The new rules, which cover both TV and radio, instruct drugmakers to use simple, consumer-friendly language when describing their drugs, without medical jargon, distracting visuals or audio effects. A 2007 law directed the FDA to ensure that drug risk information appears “in a clear, conspicuous and neutral manner.”
FDA has always required that ads give a balanced picture of both benefits and risks, a requirement that gave rise to those long, rapid-fire lists of side effects parodied on shows like “ Saturday Night Live.”
But in the early 2000s, researchers began showing how companies could manipulate images and audio to de-emphasize safety information. In one example, a Duke University professor found that ads for the allergy drug Nasonex, which featured a buzzing bee voiced by Antonio Banderas, distracted viewers from listening to side effect information, making it harder to remember.
Such overt tactics have largely disappeared from drug ads.
“In general, I would say the ads have gotten more complete and transparent,” says Ruth Day, director of the medical cognition lab at Duke University and author of the Nasonex study.
The new rules are “significant steps forward,” Day said, but certain requirements could also open the door to new ways of downplaying risks.
One requirement instructs companies to show on-screen text about side effects while the audio information plays. A 2011 FDA study found that combining text with audio increased recall and understanding.
But the agency leaves it to companies to decide whether to display a few keywords or a full transcript.
“You often cannot put all that on the screen and expect people to read and understand it,” Day said. “If you wanted to hide or decrease the likelihood of people remembering risk information, that could be the way to do it.”
Viewers tend to tune out long lists of warnings and other information. But experts who work with drug companies don’t expect those lists to disappear. While the guidelines describe how the information should be presented, companies still decide the content.
“If you’re a company and you’re worried about possible FDA enforcement or product liability and other litigation, all your incentives are to say more, not less,” said Torrey Cope, a food and drug lawyer who advises companies.
Experts also say the new rules will have little effect on the overall tone and appearance of ads.
“The most salient element of these ads are the visuals, and they are uniformly positive,” said Cox. “Even if the risk message is about, for instance, sudden heart failure, they’re still showing someone diving into a swimming pool.”
The new rules come as Donald Trump's advisers begin floating plans for the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist who has advised the president-elect, wants to eliminate TV drug ads. He and other industry critics point out that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries where prescription drugs can be promoted on TV.
Even so, many companies are looking beyond TV and expanding into social media. They often partner with patient influencers who post about managing their conditions, new treatments or navigating the health system.
“They’re teaching people to live a good life with their disease, but then some of them are also paid to advertise and persuade,” said Erin Willis, who studies advertising and media at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Advertising executives say companies like the format because it’s cheaper than TV and consumers generally feel influencers are more trustworthy than companies.
FDA’s requirement for truthful, balanced risk and benefit information applies to drugmakers, leaving a loophole for both influencers and telehealth companies like Hims, Ro and Teledoc, who may not have a direct financial connection to makers of the drugs they’re promoting.
The issue has attracted attention from members of Congress.
“The power of social media and the deluge of misleading promotions has meant too many young people are receiving medical advice from influencers instead of their health care professional,” Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Mike Braun of Indiana wrote the FDA in a February letter.
A recently introduced bill from the senators would bring influencers and telehealth companies clearly under FDA’s jurisdiction, requiring them to disclose risk and side effect information. The bill also would require drugmakers to publicly disclose payments to influencers.
“It’s asking the FDA to take a more serious stance with this kind of marketing,” said Willis. "They know it’s happening, but they could be doing more and their regulations haven’t been updated since 2014."
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
This combination of images from video shows scenes from Nasonex television commercials broadcast in the U.S. in the 2000s. (AP Photo)
