This investment will help advance the development of the instruction software and boost international growth.
The SwipeGuide Instruction Platform is used by companies around the world to improve both product onboarding 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 by 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 to solve instructional challenges.
“SwipeGuide has the potential to disrupt the way instructions are used in educating users and transferring knowledge. 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.”
- Mathijs de Wit, Partner of Newion
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 immensely, so there’s a lot of potentials 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.
SwipeGuide is an Amsterdam/Enschede based tech company that develops the next generation instruction software. This instruction platform was initially born out of the frustration of how user-hostile traditional paper user manuals are. SwipeGuide brings consumer and employee instructions to smartphone or tablet in a compelling format, using the intelligent features of the device and machine learning to make instructions more relevant and effective.
About Newion
Newion III is the third business software fund of Newion and it focuses on business software companies in the Benelux. Since its incorporation in 2000, Newion has been one of the most successful VC’s in its segment. Newion has a reputation of being a committed investor and has experience in investing in start- and scale-ups. Its previous funds successfully invested in Oxxio (exit), Mirror42 (exit), Q-go (exit), Collibra, iWelcome, 24iMedia, Synple, CustomerGauge, Instant Magazine, L1NDA, The Next Ad and Oxynade. Visit www.newion.com for more information.
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