If you hadn’t heard of them before, you may recognize Swiftlane from the Security Industry Association’s 2020 New Product Showcase, which was held virtually last week. The young company received the award for best wired access control software, hardware, device or peripheral — quite the accomplishment when going up against the biggest names in the industry.
“To me and my whole team, [the award] is a huge testament that we’re doing something right,” said Swiftlane CEO and Founder Saurabh Bajaj. “We’re not a huge 20-year-old player in the industry. We’re building something completely new in a new way, with a new lens for problem solving.”
Bajaj is able to look at access control in this completely new way due to his unique background. Previously working at companies like Facebook and Instagram, he most recently worked at Lyft building self-driving cars, where he used deep learning technologies. This tech background gave him the right technical background to build a complete facial recognition-based offering for access control.
“My primary motivation is to accelerate the positive application of AI technology now that it’s available in the world,” Bajaj said. “How can we accelerate positive, privacy-oriented, trusted solutions for physical identity that empowers people to take control of their data while unlocking seamless applications?”
Wanting to further this technology, and seeing how helpful it could be in the security space as threats continue to evolve and grow, Bajaj quit his job at Lyft less than two years ago. With this idea for a new kind of access control, he raised money from various investors (including the founders of big companies like PayPal), and built a team, built a product and started shipping it to customers.
“Since then, we have grown a lot, raised more money and continued to solve new problems,” Bajaj said. “Security can be cumbersome to the end user, so there’s a friction between security and convenience of access. So how do we combine security with frictionless access? We decided to build Swiftlane’s initial access control product to combine touchless facial recognition unlock options as an enhancement to an existing badge system or standalone system. Because everything is cloud-based, it’s updated weekly.”
Swiftlane’s access control product has only grown in popularity since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The system is fully remote, allowing users to onboard employees, revoke access and more from their mobile phones, anywhere.
The company has also released a new solution in order to respond to the changing needs of customers in the pandemic: Swiftlane Health Check. Health Check provides companies with a solution to re-opening the office and ensures businesses are complying with CDC coronavirus guidelines, implementing employee temperature checks, PPE allocation, capacity planning, staggered schedules and health announcements.
“With COVID-19, everything has changed,” Bajaj said. “Security was an insurance for a company; now security is critical in safely opening the business. In the past, you could stick to a very basic security system, but with COVID-19, you need a fully remote, cloud-based access control system — you need tools that make employees feel safe. We’re seeing that if you’re adapting to the new needs of companies because of COVID-19, that is a huge lead.”
With its team of 20 employees, Swiftlane is mostly focusing on integration opportunities, along with helping businesses safely reopen, in the next year.
“Helping companies return to work safely has been the biggest focus over the last few months, and it will continue to be the focus over the next several months, because every business in the world is struggling with this. I haven’t come across a higher priority item than this before.”
Learn more at www.swiftlane.com.
