中文Every time you twist a plastic sleeve off a drink can and watch it snarl into a ball, a small part of the planet dies a little. Swaay, a scrappy startup from Mullingar, Ireland, thinks it can make that moment disappear.
The company just closed an equity round of over 2 million EUR, led by BVP with backing from its investor club, to take its direct-to-shape (DTS) digital print platform commercial. Here’s the idea: instead of wrapping cans in plastic labels and shrink sleeves, you print the artwork directly onto the container. No plastic. No sleeve. No peeling. The can is the label.
Founded in 2026, Swaay is built for beverage co-packers and producers who live in the messy world of short runs. Tens of billions of plastic shrink sleeves and labels are used globally every year just to serve the short-run beverage market — and Swaay’s bet is that fragmented labeling rules, national deposit schemes, and demand for tailored messaging make every traditional run a headache. The company says a billion cans a year have already moved away from plastic, and DTS can close the remaining gaps on cost, geography, and quality. They peg the sector as already multibillion-euro.
The team isn’t green. CEO and co-founder Ciarán Gorman previously co-founded Bevcraft Group and spent a decade on an international scale-up. His co-founders — Mark O’Donnell (CCO), Sébastien Baril (COO), and Jean-François Gaudreault (CTO) — round out a crew that’s built and run manufacturing before. “In this sector execution is everything,” noted Stephen Burdock, head of investments at BVP, which led the round. “Swaay has a credible plan to make direct-to-shape printing work at scale.”
There’s a smart geographic play too. Swaay keeps a production and technical hub in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, so it can serve Europe and North America from day one. The funding will seed new roles in Mullingar.
O’Donnell frames the customer pain sharply: “Brands care whether they can get a market-ready product in weeks, in the quantity they need, and in the markets they want to serve or test.” That’s the short-run promise DTS delivers — print a small batch for a test market without tooling up a sleeve line.
The bigger story is cultural. Cans keep eating share from other packaging formats, and the plastic that dresses them is increasingly a liability, not a feature. A startup that deletes the plastic while keeping the beautiful artwork is swimming with the current, not against it.
Whether Swaay scales is the open question. But the problem it’s attacking is real, large, and getting more expensive to ignore by the quarter.
Source: Labels & Labeling (published 27 October 2026).
