From left: Mark O’Donnell, Jean-François Gaudreault, Sébastien Baril and Ciarán Gorman. Image: Swaay Technologies
The funding round was led by BVP with participation from members of the BVP Investor Club.
Irish industrial technology company Swaay Technologies has raised €2m in an equity investment round for its distributed manufacturing and printed-can platform for beverage brands.
The start-up said it is building a full-stack platform to help beverage co-packers and producers adopt emerging direct-to-shape (DTS) printing technology, which can apply artwork directly onto drinks cans and remove the need for plastic labels and shrink sleeves.
Swaay – founded this year – is based in Mullingar, Co Westmeath and has a production and technical hub in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada. According to the company, it combines “short-run digital can production with contract fillers, distributors and ecosystem partners across North America”.
Swaay said the new funding would take the company into commercial production through its DTS platform – which aims to embed new manufacturing innovation with software and data to deliver scalability – and support future roles in Mullingar.
According to the company, its founders – CEO Ciarán Gorman, COO Sébastien Baril, CCO Mark O’Donnell and CTO Jean-François Gaudreault – have “decades of experience in the technology, beverage and print industries” between them.
DTS printing eliminates the need for plastic labels and shrink sleeves by printing artwork directly onto a container, according to Swaay, potentially offering brands greater flexibility, easier recycling and shorter lead times.
The company said this can help drinks producers navigate away from traditional considerations such as fragmented labelling rules, national deposit return schemes and demand for tailored messaging, which add complexity and result in “tens of billions of plastic shrink sleeves and labels” being used globally.
“Brands care whether they can get a market-ready product in weeks, in the quantity they need and in the markets they want to serve or test,” said O’Donnell. “This round helps us serve this real demand commercially.”
The company said that 1bn cans per year have moved to non-plastic labelling alternatives, and predicted that “billions more will follow as DTS closes the remaining gaps on cost, geographic availability and quality”.
“I see a huge opportunity to build and scale Swaay into a global technology-driven company from Ireland,” said Gorman, who previously co-founded the Bevcraft Group.
The funding round was led by BVP, an Irish investment firm headquartered in Dublin, with participation from members of the BVP Investor Club.
BVP head of investments Stehen Burdock said: “Swaay has an operating team that has built and run manufacturing businesses before, and in this sector execution is everything.
“Short-run labelling is a real and rising cost problem for brands, and cans keep taking share from other packaging formats. Swaay has a credible plan to make direct-to-shape printing work at scale.”
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