Hadleigh Ford

Hadleigh Ford is a New Zealand entrepreneur and the founder of SwipedOn, the cloud-based visitor management platform used in more than 7,000 locations across 74 countries.

Ford’s path to software was unconventional. He began his career at 17 in the marine industry, working his way up to master mariner on merchant vessels, cruise ships and superyachts. The idea for SwipedOn came while he was helping set up a brand-new $100 million superyacht in Germany, where a paper visitor book was still the only sign-in method for the hundreds of contractors coming aboard each day. It struck him as absurd that a vessel of that value and complexity relied on pen and paper for something so basic.

In 2013 he founded SwipedOn from a spare room in Tauranga, choosing, as he put it, to combine sun, surf and software. The product launched initially as a simple iPad app on Apple’s App Store, digitising the visitor check-in process for workplaces. It found traction quickly: Ford closed a $1 million capital raise with Enterprise Angels in late 2017 and in October 2018, less than a year later, SwipedOn was acquired by UK AIM-listed SmartSpace Software for $11 million, with $8.6 million in cash and the remainder in shares split among Ford, co-founder and head of product Ben Scott, CTO Matt Cooney and head of marketing Paul Hansen. Enterprise Angels investors received a 2.4x return on their investment.

By then, clients included Fujitsu, Estée Lauder, Mitsubishi and Hugo Boss. Ford stayed on as CEO post-acquisition, keeping staff and operations in Tauranga. Newsroom asked whether he had sold too soon, a question that speaks to how quickly the company had grown and how much further it might have gone.

Since the sale, Ford has become an active angel investor through Enterprise Angels, backing the next generation of New Zealand startups. He won Enterprise Angels’ Investor Rep/Director of the Year award for his work with investee company Supie, bringing the same practical, founder-to-founder perspective he built during SwipedOn’s growth.

Ford’s profile is noteworthy because he turned a superyacht captain’s frustration with paper sign-in books into a global SaaS business, built it from a Tauranga spare room and sold it within five years: a compact, practical example of New Zealand software reaching international scale.

Sources: NZ Herald · Idealog · Newsroom