Swit - Putting An End To Application Juggling

Company & Team Introduction

Swit.io offers a suite of collaboration software tools, allowing teams to centralize their collaborative workflows into one single application. The company was founded by CEO Josh Lee and CTO Max Lim in 2017 after growing tired of the endless mess of switching between email, chat, and task management software. Lim’s first company was Auction.co.kr, later selling a majority stake to eBay for 120M in 2001, an incredible exit, especially when considering market conditions at the time. Lee attended Seoul National University, which has helped them network tremendously and expand rapidly throughout South Korea. Swit is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has grown their team size to ~170, with the majority of their employees based in Seoul, Korea.

Product Overview

Founder and CEO Josh Lee set out to build Swit into what he calls a “compound” startup. Compound startups are built by creating large, intricate product ecosystems rather than the conventional advice of building a point solution. Point solutions are less complex to build, but are much more difficult to sell due to lower functionality and higher competition. Swit’s platform offers users a combination of Slack-like team chat, project management features of Asana, Monday.com, Wrike, Jira, etc., organization management features, plug-ins for additional functionality, and integrations with 3rd party applications like email, docs, and calendar apps, eliminating the need to constantly switch between the crowd of point solutions most companies use today. The company has fostered strong relationships with some of the biggest companies in the world; for example, Swit is a trusted AI partner to Google, which grants them special access to their Bard API, which should allow them to be one of the first to market with any new AI-enabled features.

Total Addressable Market

Swit’s product solves multiple massive pain points for companies, and its addressable market continues to grow yearly. 83% of working professionals depend on software to collaborate, and 91% of businesses use two or more different messaging applications; Swit can help companies with both issues. The internal team communication total addressable market alone is estimated to be as large as 28B today, and the project management tools addressable market was valued at 6.1B in 2021 and is slated to snowball to over 15B by 2030 for a 10.68% CAGR in the period.

Business Model & The Numbers

Swit uses a SaaS business model that is priced per seat. Companies can choose which Swit features they need for their business and pay accordingly. For example, if a company only wants to pay to use one of their main tools (chat, project management), they can. But Swit shines when companies choose the “hub” plan, which offers the two products together at a discount. For “hub” pricing, plans start at “Startup” at $1.5/user/month up to 25 seats, “Growth” at $6/user/month gives users more file storage and three more workspaces, “Business” at $11/user/month for SAML based SSO and further increases in storage and workspaces, and “Business Pro” at $24/user/month which offers further increases in workspaces and storage plus security and administrative functionality like two-factor authentication, audit logs, and file download control. Customers can also pay for plug-ins such as “Goals” to help track company KPIs and OKRs (0.96/user/month) and “Approvals” to help companies manage employee requests such as travel reimbursements or time off requests (0.96/user/month).

Traction

The company also boasts an impressively diverse customer list with over 35,000 companies using Swit across 180 countries, with substantial traction amongst US and Korean-based companies. Swit already has over 300 paying customers in the US alone who have migrated from one or more of the largest collaborative tools in the world, such as Slack, Jira, Monday, Asana, etc. The list of companies that have adopted Swit include X.com, WeWork, and Thompson Reuters for US-based firms, but their technology has also captured the attention of top Korean companies such as TMON.inc and Korean Air Lines Co.

Competitors

Swit is playing in one of the most competitive software markets in the world, collaboration tools. The collaborative software landscape is packed full of unicorns, including Slack (Salesforce), Trello (Atlassian), Jira (Atlassian), Monday.com, Asana, Wrike, Airtable, etc. All the listed companies are well-known brands worth over a billion dollars and “beat” Swit to market with their products, allowing them to win contracts and build a brand for years before Swit was even an idea. It wasn’t until the founders of Swit saw the collaborative mess these companies had created that led to their centralized approach to collaboration. Swit’s “last mover advantage” allowed the team to see the inefficiencies of past products that differentiate them from the masses of point solutions available today.

Funding

Swit has raised five rounds of funding thus far, including seed raises of 1m in 2018, a 6M round in 2019, and a 5M round in 2020. After significant investments to build out a skilled team and product, the company raised a series A round totalling around 18M in 2021 with participation from top Korean-based venture firms such as SV Investment, Smilegate Investment, Dunamu & Partners, and IMM Investment to build out their new Swit 2.0 platform. The series A round valued the startup at 80M. Swit raised an additional funding round of 4M in 2022. Now, the company has their sights set on scaling towards their series B round, which they plan to raise sometime in 2024.