Office Access Platform SwiftConnect Acquires HID SAFE

SwiftConnect, which bills itself as a connected access office property platform, announced Wednesday that it has acquired HID SAFE, a leading company in the field of managing access to properties.

The acquisition will enhance Stamford, Conn.-based SwiftConnect’s physical access platform with HID SAFE’s identity governance capability, said Matt Kopel, co-CEO of SwiftConnect. Kopel declined to state the financial and stock terms of the deal.

The transaction builds on HID’s prior participation in SwiftConnect’s Series B funding round, Kopel said. HID SAFE will hold a minority, non-controlling interest in SwiftConnect as a result of the acquisition. SwiftConnect will remain an independent company, controlled and managed by its existing leadership team, which includes co-CEO Chip Kruger.

“It starts with customer feedback,” Kopel said of the HID SAFE acquisition. “What we’ve built so far with our connected network is something that customers like. One of the things that customers ask for is a governance layer on top. We help put identities and credentials from one system to another for potential customers, from enterprises to their landlord. Customers were asking for us to expand our capabilities to include this governance to figure out where somebody’s identity should go and where they should have access based on certain attributes about them or approvals.”

As an investor in SwiftConnect prior to its acquisition, HID SAFE was already a shareholder, but will now increase its minority share in the company with no operational influence, said Kopel. While the HID name will go away, the SAFE brand will remain on the platform for now. It will be re-evaluated over the coming months as to whether it will be kept longterm, Kopel added. The integration process has already begun, with both companies serving large enterprises globally.

“HID SAFE has earned the trust of the world’s most security-driven organizations for more than two decades,” said Björn Lidefelt, executive vice president and head of HID SAFE. “Great technology deserves the space to reach its full potential, and SwiftConnect is the right partner to take it there.”

Shane Butler, executive vice president of identity at SwiftConnect, recently joined the company to lead the SAFE business. “This acquisition accelerates the modernization of SAFE by delivering it via our connected access network so organizations can manage physical and digital access through the same governance, risk, and compliance lens,” Butler said in a statement. “This is the moment when these two worlds will finally speak the same language, and being a part of this industry transformation is precisely why I joined SwiftConnect.”

SwiftConnect’s acquisition of HID SAFE was a logical extension of its original mandate, said Kopel.

“We were created to manage the life cycle of identities and credentials anywhere that an employee has to go, and to provide effortless access everywhere for that employee based on where they are allowed,” Kopel explained. “Whether it’s your own company’s locations, the landlords that your company rents from, or if you’re a visitor somewhere. Our job is to basically unify identity management and to make access to where you are allowed seamless. SAFE is going to help grow our network.”

Earlier in July, SwiftConnect announced it was growing its network through a partnership with real estate technology platform VTS.

“Access control remains one of the most fragmented parts of the commercial real estate technology stack, making it incredibly difficult for owners to deliver a consistent, modern experience for tenants at scale,” said Nick Romito, CEO and co-founder of VTS, at the time of the partnership announcement. “Our customers don’t want another silo to manage. They expect technology that works together, and SwiftConnect’s expertise in networking all of the technologies that govern identity and physical access enables us to deliver a more connected workplace experience while staying focused on building the industry’s most intelligent operating platform.”

While the vast majority of SwiftConnect’s customers are companies with multiple locations or businesses in large office buildings, Kopel sees other real estate opportunities.

“We do really well when there’s a mix of an enterprise and a landlord,” Kopel said. “One of the other areas where there’s an enterprise and a landlord that’s not an office is a colocation data center. So, many of our customers rent cages inside of a colocation data center, and they control the access to those cages, but they don’t hold access to the front door. That’s done by the company that owns the data center. That looks exactly the same to us — like a landlord and an enterprise tenant space in an office building.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.