A New Horizon: Exploring What Swyft’s Series A With Crook TechCrunch APIs Can Do

Introduction

TechCrunch is excited to announce that Swyft Cities won the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2022 release and is ramping up to Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. Beyond Aero is second.

The Mountain View-based company is committed to refining transportation using lightweight, autonomous vehicles with fixed wires. The company says its solution offers a lower cost per mile with fewer carbon dioxide emissions than conventional transportation options.

What is Swyft?

Swyft sees this as an original form of city mobility that can solve transport problems in thickly developed areas, including corporate campuses, airports, universities, and tourist wards.

Swyft was co-founded by Aadil Kazmi (CEO), Zeeshan Hamid (Head of Engineering), and Maraz Rahman (Head of Sales). Kazmi and Hamid built their careers at Amazon, working on data and the last mile for the giant. Rahman was one of the first employees at a YC-backed tech startup.

The podium is novel in that the vehicles move on a stationary cable, allowing new connections to be added as needed. This adds capacity to an area, allowing for higher density and more profitable development. It also reduces parking costs and reduces traffic. In some areas, providing influences within site can generate great value.

Leveraging Google’s existing partnership with Holmes Solutions in Christchurch, New Zealand, for R&D, Swyft has created a minimal product and secured its first customer deal since its founding. The startup is now working with Remarkables Park in Queenstown, a large residential, retail, and office space, to develop a network of autonomous gondolas. Swyft aims to have the first vehicles in operation around August 2024, according to Poskey.

This model is how Swyft sees itself scaling in other environments and cities. By starting small, it’s easy to expand, said Poskey, who explained that the Swyft system does not have an endpoint like a train or even a traditional gondola system but operates on a network that can grow outward from any node, thus adding additional value. So while these connections may start in smaller settings, they will be able to connect to other forms of public transport more quickly as they grow.

Swyft Delivery Times

Swyft is a marketplace that connects a network of operators with suppliers. But the company also provides these operators with software to make them more efficient. It turns them into a large network that allows them to fetch more inventory without adding to their infrastructure.

We have become accustomed to next-day or same-day delivery thanks to big players like Amazon and Walmart. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers.

What Swyft’s Series A With Crook TechCrunch APIs Can Do

The definition above comes from a publication on the API Pioneer Index released by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm whose interests include “finding the most promising early-stage software companies commercializing APIs.”

GGV’s thesis on API-led startups has already led the company to back Authing, Pinwheel, Mindee, Stream, and Agora, the last of which went public in 2020. And outside of GGV’s portfolio, Okta acquired API-focused Auth0 for a whopping 6.5 billion dollars, giving the company yet another reason to track down other private companies using a similar method.

About 40% of the GGV API-First Index consists of fintech companies. That’s a lot, but it also shows room for early developer companies in other spaces. The promise of API companies, GGV wrote, is to “fundamentally simplify software development,” There’s no reason this should be limited to banking or payment solutions.

How much funds did Swyft raised in series A?

Swyft, a company that just raised $17.5 million in Series A, helps retailers of all sizes offer affordable same-day delivery. The circular was co-led by Inovia Capital and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Shopify and existing investors Golden Ventures and Trucks VC.

The GGV index excludes companies that have exited and rank the 50 API-led private companies that have raised the most funds. Barring an IPO, Stripe tops the list, while AI/ML startup Deepgram is the latest to take the plunge, having raised around $56 million in funding so far. GGV says that the top API companies in its index have raised $12 billion in funding, including $5 billion in 2021 alone.

Conclusion

A note about the large number of startups we are discussing: to prepare for this particular post, I asked Twitter to partner with API-led companies. And he delivered it.

Some API-first startups have pretty cool names, like Metronome and Sardine. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore Speechly, Seam, Daily, Liveblocks, Ayoconnect, Capsule, DeliverFaster, Privy, and Lob. Likewise, PhloConnect, EditFrame, Conduit, Drivly, AtomicInvest, LogicLoop, and Project44 are on the market.

I’m sharing the full list of responses because it underscores how many startups we’re talking about. (Note: some new APIs had such generic names that we couldn’t find their homepage – something to keep in mind.)