Swipely, the simple way for local merchants to accept payments, understand customers and grow sales, today announced it was named one of “America’s Most Promising Companies” by Forbes Magazine. Chosen from thousands of applicants, the awards recognize the nation’s one hundred most promising high-growth private companies with compelling business models, strong management teams, notable customers, strategic partners and precious investment capital.

Swipely is the first Rhode Island company ever named to the Forbes list. Swipely made its debut on Forbes’ list less than one year after introducing its breakthrough product that transforms payment processing into valuable analytics and marketing tools, without increasing cost. The company is growing by more than 50 percent each quarter, disrupting the $90 billion U.S. payments market. Today, Swipely has over $400 million in sales under management, helping hundreds of merchants understand over 875,000 consumers.

“Swipely’s vision is to bring powerful, simple and affordable online tools to offline businesses. Today’s recognition by Forbes validates both our huge opportunity, and our traction with customers,” said Angus Davis, founder and CEO of Swipely. “As the first Rhode Island company ever named to the Forbes list, I am especially proud of our winning team.”

Swipely crunches the “big data” behind every card transaction for local restaurants, salons and other retailers, using that data to enable a suite of marketing tools that help local businesses understand customers and grow sales. These powerful tools are easy to use and cost nothing more than what merchants already pay to accept credit and debit cards. Swipely is a good fit for merchants accepting over $30,000 in monthly card sales.

To take a tour of Swipely, visit http://swipely.com/ or call 888-SWIPELY.

About Swipely:
Swipely is a simple way for local merchants to accept payments, understand customers and grow sales. Swipely’s valuable analytics, loyalty and marketing tools work with systems merchants already have and with cards consumers already use. Merchants use Swipely to manage over 400 million dollars in sales and to understand and grow relationships with more than 875,000 consumers.

Founded by Angus Davis, the Providence, RI based company includes veterans of Tellme, Microsoft, Netscape, LivingSocial and SeamlessWeb, and is backed by leading Silicon Valley investors including Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, and First Round Capital, among others, who have made the largest software venture investment in Rhode Island history.

About Forbes “America’s Most Promising Companies”:
One metric never says it all. For the Most Promising list, Forbes strove for a holistic gauge of young, privately-held companies, trying to pin down their trajectories by looking at a slew of variables. Over the course of six months Forbes reviewed thousands of applications. The final assessment is based on growth (both in sales and hiring), quality of management team and investors, margins, market size and key partnerships. Forbes turned to CB Insights, a Manhattan-based data research firm that specializes in assessing private companies, to refine the search. Their MOSAIC software scans 45,000 sources to measure a company’s health. A new distribution deal, for example, marks a positive signal, while the loss of an executive is a negative. MOSAIC gathers those myriad signals into a final score that Forbes uses as an initial guide in producing the list. After verifying sales numbers, speaking with each company and debating their merits and blemishes, Forbes produces a final ranking.