CreativeCo invests $2.0M in swivl, the AI leader for self storage operators

It’s not surprising that there are 60,000 self-storage facilities in the US alone. We all love our stuff and often times need an extra place to put it. As a result, the +$50B self storage market is one of the most steadily-growing, economically resilient real estate categories.

Self storage investors and operators are increasingly adopting software and embracing technology to enable autonomous operations, where renters can engage with their units in a self-service manner. Operators want to provide 24/7 high sales and service levels to win new business and retain customers, but at the same time, they also want to reduce labor requirements at their facilities to run as efficiently as possible.

That’s where AI and swivl come into the picture. Kyle Hall, Rodolfo Ramirez, Chuck Reina, and Mason Levy (left to right above) made a wise choice to focus their AI-based software company on the self storage market in 2021. They discovered that savvy self storage operators were looking for the next level of efficiency beyond their legacy FMS and call center software. They were looking for real automation, and AI was becoming strong enough to handle the use cases in self storage.

It was perfect timing, and Kyle, Rodolfo, Chuck and Mason have since won more than 100 multi-location operators as swivl customers by providing the only AI automation platform built specifically for self storage.

swivl is a flexible platform that engages with customers across multiple channels (voice, text, email and chat) and integrates seamlessly to other systems (FMS, website) to automatically handle numerous sales and service use cases - from selling a new unit, to move-ins, to gate codes, to payments, to renewals, work orders, move outs, and more. swivl mixes conversational customer engagement with configurable workflows to accurately tackle an increasing number of use cases, driving higher levels of automation as the platform and dataset mature.

Today, we’re excited to announce that CreativeCo has invested $2M in swivl via our early growth equity-focused CreativeCo Fund III.

We were first introduced to swivl back in 2020 by Dave Payne in Atlanta, who at the time was a Partner at TechStars. We remained in touch over the last few years, and this year everything lined up with our new fund and swivl’s need to raise just enough capital to keep their high growth (2.5x) and highly capital efficient (1.5x ARR / capital spent) approach to building the business moving forward. It’s even more rare that swivl was accomplishing their momentum profitably since 2022. We agreed with management that a small number of hires in product, sales and success would be very helpful in taking advantage of their big opportunity, so together we created a deal that provided growth capital and a little secondary for early investors.

We are just in the first inning of AI’s impact. We love that swivl is applying AI innovation to the specific needs of the self storage vertical, and doing so in partnership with operators in this space both large and small. Today the ROI is very clear. It’s exciting to think about what our platform will be doing for self storage operators five years from now as swivl continues to invest in being the AI leader for this market.

CreativeCo is excited to join the swivl journey, and we look forward to putting our growth equity studio model to work for Kyle, Rodolfo, Chuck and Mason.