Newion Investment and SwipeGuide’s current seed investor have invested another one million euro equity investment. Newion decided to step in, being impressed with the growth of the company last year. The investment will help advance the software development and boost international growth.
Instruction platform for consumers
The SwipeGuide Instruction Platform is used by companies around the world to improve both productonboarding experience for consumer durables and work instructions. This is done through offering visual or augmented step-by-step instructions that are instantly delivered to a customizable smart app. The software is based on continued academic research on instructional design and UX/UI learnability for which the company has a strong cooperation with the University of Twente.
Strong client portfolio
Over the course of two years SwipeGuide has built a strong client portfolio with launching customers like Philips, Ziggo, Quby, ARAG, Eijsink, and Duux. SwipeGuide operates on two different domains:
• product user guides for consumers or professional users
• and work instructions in the Industry 4.0 domain
Funding from launching customers and seed investment
In 2016 SwipeGuide started developing the instruction platform and funded itself through launching customers until 2017. In early 2017 the company raised a €300,000 seed investment to increase the speed of development. In June 2017, the company released the first beta of the SwipeGuide Instruction Platform. The founding team consists of CEO Willemijn Schneyder, Co-founder and CID (Chief Instruction Design) Daan Assen, CTO Joost Elfering and Head of Growth Tim Rijke. The company has since then grown to a team of 15 dedicated people.
Investment in development of future technologies
Currently SwipeGuide is developing an augmented reality prototype with which an instruction can be delivered to the end-user through image or voice recognition. Machine learning is being implemented to help editors create the best instructions possible with live tips and feedback while editing. This feature makes sure that SwipeGuide really helps solving instructional challenges.
Mathijs de Wit, Partner of Newion: “SwipeGuide has the potential to disrupt the way instructions are used in educating users and transferring knowledge. The market is ready to innovate and customers are extremely positive about the product. We believe our investment can help SwipeGuide to become acknowledged as thought leader in the domain and grow to become a dominant instruction software vendor.”
International opportunities
The current investment will further boost the international growth of SwipeGuide. Although SwipeGuide already has an international presence, the company wants to expand its reach by opening an office in New York in 2019 for increased exposure on the American market. “We are being contacted by an increasing number of US companies. The US market is so vast and the percentage of manufacturing companies still using static paper immense, so there’s a lot of potential for us to expand in that market”, Willemijn Schneyder (CEO) says.
Future visions
With products becoming increasingly intuitive some critics say that SwipeGuide’s instruction platform will be obsolete in the future. The team however, points out that companies tend to overestimate the easiness of use of products and machines for the average user. No matter how intuitive they are, troubleshooting and error resolutions will always be a necessity. With the data insights that SwipeGuide is collecting, the company could – in the far future – transcend into product design and development. This clear vision of future development also helped SwipeGuide win the Young Technology Award in February 2018.
Photocredits: Pexels/Pixabay
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