Swept’s Cleaning Company App Sweeps Up $2 Million

Halifax-based Swept has secured $2 million USD in seed funding for its mobile SaaS communication platform built specifically for janitorial companies.

The financing round was led by iNovia Capital and Afore Capital, and will help Swept grow their team, expand international sales and bolster product development.

Launched two years ago, Swept streamlines janitorial company operations through in-app tools including client messaging, time and attendance tracking, employee scheduling and incident reporting. The platform’s advanced auto-translation feature also allows cleaners and managers to write to one another in over 100 languages.

The mobile software solution is injecting innovation in an old industry with its scalable technology, something that sparked interest from iNovia’s principal David Nault.

“We believe in Swept because their founding team is stacked with janitorial industry operators; and because their technology is ultimately about improving quality through improving community,” said Nault in a statement. “Swept is helping employers and employees feel more connected. This is 100 per cent in line with our vision as a fund.”

Swept’s second investor Afore Capital officially launched last week after raising $47 million in capital to invest in pre-seed startups.

Co-founders Michael Brown and Matt Cooper got the idea for Swept while running their own cleaning company. Heading a janitorial business, the pair faced challenges common to the industry, including high employee turnover rates from unsatisfied workers.

Without a solution on the market, they built a communications platform to better support their cleaners. It gave them a competitive edge that lead them to expanding to Toronto and Cleveland, and maintain a 10 per cent turnover rate—a fraction of the industry range of 75 to 375 per cent.

“We built the software after running a janitorial company ourselves and experiencing the same pain points our customers do. We’ve come a long way from cleaning toilets at three a.m. when a cleaner didn’t show up,” Brown said in a release.

The co-founders quickly realized they could help solve an industry-wide problem and launched Swept for other janitorial companies to use.

“We’ve seen the solution act as a game changer for our customers and their employees and that is driving us to get this on every cleaner’s phone around the world,” said Brown.

“The pain we’re solving for the janitorial industry is huge, with over 800,000 potential customers in North America alone, and average employee turnover rates of up to 375 per cent annually,” he added.

Earlier this year, Swept graduated from the California-based 500 Startups accelerator program. Since then, Swept grew its user base to over 10,000 in seven countries.