Go Swag, a Glasgow-based company that handles corporate gifting from product selection to delivery, has raised $5 million to fund its expansion into the United States. Conor McKenna and his co-founder started the business in 2019 with a straightforward premise: a gift bearing a company's name either builds that brand or chips away at it. Six years later, the company serves over 1,000 clients and is now targeting its largest market yet.
Corporate gifting is a large industry, and by most accounts, a poorly functioning one. The market is projected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2028, yet much of it still relies on fragmented suppliers, slow procurement systems, and generic merchandise. Go Swag estimates that 84% of branded gifts are either passed on to someone else or discarded entirely. For companies that care about sustainability or brand perception, that is a meaningful problem.
The $5 million round was led by Mercia Ventures, with Techstart Ventures and a number of angel investors also participating. Total funding now stands at $6.2 million.
Most companies do not have a clean, simple way to run a gifting program. Procurement teams typically deal with multiple suppliers, manage international shipping, chase recipients for delivery details, and try to make sense of inconsistent inventory data. The result is usually a compromise: a generic product chosen to minimize logistics headaches rather than to reflect the company's actual brand.
The problem compounds at scale. When a company needs to send gifts across several countries, customs rules, local suppliers, and language barriers add another layer of complexity. Many organizations simply default to whatever is easiest, which rarely produces a result that anyone is proud of.
The waste issue adds further pressure. Gifts that miss the mark on quality, size, or relevance tend not to stay with the recipient. Sustainability is increasingly part of company commitments, and branded merchandise that ends up in a bin is hard to reconcile with those goals.
The money will go toward three things: growing the team, expanding infrastructure, and continuing to develop the platform's technology. Go Swag currently employs 30 people in Glasgow. It plans to reach 70 employees, adding headcount across sales, engineering, operations, and growth.
On the warehouse side, the company is opening a new facility in Southeast Asia. It already has warehouses in the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States. A wider distribution network allows Go Swag to fulfill orders closer to their destination, which reduces shipping times and simplifies customs clearance.
"Go Swag is building a technology business in a sector that has resisted innovation for decades. Conor and Ben identified the structural advantage, then delivered enterprise-grade programmes at a fraction of the operational cost of incumbents. Go Swag seized a category-defining opportunity and capably translated it into sustained growth." — Hugo Lough, Investment Director, Mercia Ventures
Work on automation will also continue. The company is developing tools to handle quoting, account management, and product recommendations with less manual input, which will allow it to take on more clients without a proportional increase in staff.
McKenna and his co-founder launched Go Swag in 2019 with less than £200. The idea came from firsthand experience: large, well-known brands had no reliable way to source and deliver quality gifts at the scale their operations required.
The platform is built around two main tools. The first is Sonny™, an AI engine that generates product recommendations tailored to a client's brand. Instead of browsing a static catalogue, teams receive a curated shortlist quickly. The second is Claim Pages™, a feature that collects addresses and clothing sizes directly from gift recipients. According to the company, this cuts typical gifting administration by up to 96%, removing the back-and-forth that usually falls on internal teams. Clients can track orders, monitor inventory, and view program performance through a single interface.
"Corporate gifting is a trillion-dollar industry that spent decades normalising mediocrity because no one built a competitively viable alternative. We started Go Swag with less than £200 and the belief that every gift a company puts its name on either strengthens the brand or quietly undermines it. This funding allows us to take this conviction global, beginning with a major US market expansion. The catalogue is dead and we're replacing it with smart AI-assisted curation and a better gifting process to match." — Conor McKenna, CEO and Co-Founder, Go Swag
The client list includes Meta, Apple, Netflix, ElevenLabs, and n8n. One example of how the platform gets deployed in practice: Go Swag installed branded vending machines across Meta's three London offices, described as the first co-branded gifting machines placed inside a global tech workplace. Since 2019, the company has grown at a compound annual rate of 112%, roughly doubling every year.
Mercia Ventures led the round. The firm backs high-growth technology companies in the UK. Techstart Ventures, which focuses on early-stage businesses, also took part, alongside a group of angel investors.
The $5 million raise brings Go Swag's total funding to $6.2 million, which points to a smaller earlier round, though the terms of that previous funding were not disclosed. Hugo Lough of Mercia highlighted the founders' attention to scalability and their ability to build a technology-driven operation in a sector that had largely resisted it.
