Why we invested in SwiftComply
Compliance sucks. Not only for the city that has to deal with bad data and reams of paper and pdfs, but especially for those restaurants that have to fill out tedious forms after service closes at midnight on a Tuesday when all they want to do is sleep. ALL restaurants, anywhere with a commercial kitchen, and any industry that produces FOG (fats, oils, and grease - yum!) have to do this every week in order for municipalities to avoid the build up of FOG in their system. Non-compliance - which increases the likelihood of this build-up becoming fatbergs - is a major issue because the process is awful. There needs to be an easier way for high frequency (and frankly all frequency) compliance requirements to be easy for people to comply with. Sounds like a job for software…
SwiftComply is a one-stop shop for water utilities’ compliance needs. They provide an all-in-one cloud-based regulatory compliance software that helps customers manage their essential FOG, Backflow, Stormwater and Pretreatment compliance programs. We’re thrilled to announce our (ridiculously belated follow-on) investment in SwiftComply after our first investment in 2020. Here’s why we did it.
Titanic Pain
Fatbergs are a HUGE problem for wastewater and sewer systems. They’re massively expensive to remove and require full compliance by local restaurants, commercial kitchens and industries to be avoided. But the compliance system is a cumbersome, paper form process that requires lots of time from people who don’t have it. For the utilities and municipal agencies that have to sort through all the paperwork and then try to track down the missing information. SwiftComply simplifies the process, increasing compliance rates significantly. That means less time dealing with fatbergs and a ton of money saved.
Founder/Market Fit
SwiftComply was one of the first examples where it really became clear to Tom WHY founder/market fit was so important. Mick O’Dwyer (CEO) was a FOG program manager in Dublin for 10+ years. He devised the first compliance program in the EU. He knows the market intimately, and has high credibility with his customers. He understands the significance of the cloud as well as the opportunity in improved UI/UX for his clients. Mick couldn’t build a product that his customers didn’t want even if he tried.
Impressive Customer Acquisition
Prior to our meeting Mick in 2019, SwiftComply had completed the successful acquisition of a legacy service-provider in their area of the market. Mick’s ability to think around the problem of customer acquisition costs for utility and municipal software allowed the team to short-circuit the issue without waiting for utility sales timelines. Since 2020, SwiftComply moved from 15 to 400 clients in North America alone. Their software is now used by over 400 cities, including half of the twenty largest cities in the USA, and serves over 50 million citizens across North America with much, much more to come.
Layering Value
SwiftComply’s large base of customers allows Mick and the team a core commercial advantage; it is much easier to solve additional problems for existing customers, than it is to convince new ones they need your system. And the team is rapidly discovering new problems they can solve for their customers tripling their offerings to include backflow, stormwater and pretreatment compliance programs with many more in the pipeline. SwiftComply now has a shot at being THE compliance platform for cities, even beyond water - a multi-billion dollar market.
SwiftComply’s keen intuition into what their customers need is allowing them to solve the biggest issues in municipal compliance and build a company equipped to solve multiple universal challenges in one easy platform. This is vital to the efficiency and resilience of cities and municipalities, and we can’t wait to see what’s next for this growing team. Mick and the entire SwiftComply team, thanks for letting us be a part of it.