Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 06.08.2025 
2025 has been a landmark year for pioneering lift sim company, SIMSINLifts. Not only did the young enterprise, founded in late 2023, reach record turnover, but soon after presenting at this year’s LiftEx, SIMSINLifts also announced its expansion from the UK into Europe.
More thrilling still, the company has been shortlisted for the UK Business Tech Award’s Best Use of Innovation category 2025 – thanks to the valuable stream of sector-first solutions it continues to launch for its target market.
When SIMSINLifts was first launched, the idea was to ensure emergency lift phone calls would never be dropped, even in an unprecedented era of change, when UK landlines are to be fully phased out and replaced by mobile connections by January 2027. For the lift industry, this means installing sim cards into lift GSMs to allow emergency calls to be placed should the elevator get stuck. However, SIMSINLifts recognised early on that this could be a problem if lift companies continued to rely on sim cards that were limited to one single mobile network.
Lifts are notorious for their patchy signal at the best of times, particularly given their thick walls and typical location in the interior of buildings. SIMSINLifts therefore decided to bring multi-roam technology to the lift industry, creating sims designed specifically for lifts that could connect – not just to one – but any mobile network. These sims always select the strongest available network. The risk of trapped passengers not being able to call for help is therefore eliminated entirely.
Of course, as a company whose founders – Chaim Grunfeld and Chaim Berkowicz – are committed to driving positive change – SIMSINLifts’ innovation didn’t end there. In fact, the company went on to create the lift industry’s first ever dedicated lift sim management portal, designed to make the jobs of lift companies and engineers infinitely easier.
In the past, lift engineers had to return to the site to activate lift sim cards once the elevator they had already installed was ready for use (unless the building manager was willing to activate from day one, absorbing unnecessary cost). Using the SIMSINLifts portal, however, the same engineers can activate the sims they have installed remotely, without needing to make unnecessary repeat site visits. This saves lift companies, who may be managing hundreds of lifts over multiple locations, significant time. It also saves building managers vital costs, as coverage is only paid for when the lift – and therefore sim – is actually in use.
This innovative platform also ensures that lift sim cards never run out of credit. The Lift Sim Manager – aptly named in reflection of its many management benefits – operates on a rolling basis, with users receiving handy monthly email reminders when contacts are up for renewal. If sims no longer need to be active, no problem. Users can simply log into the portal and deactivate the sim in question at the click of a button – safe in the knowledge they can resume coverage instantaneously, at any time. The cost benefits of this have been enormous for SIMSINLifts clients. Lift companies using the platform likewise also gain enhanced visibility over all their emergency lift communication units, thanks to the portal’s unique search feature. This allows elevator companies to search by sim location, UK-based telephone number (another handy industry first), or active/inactive status.
The platform boasts an in-depth billing experience, too. Invoices can be easily downloaded for better budgeting across lift businesses. This is in addition to a myriad of other pioneering features, including but not limited to engineers being able to place one-click sim orders for a specified number of sims to a predetermined address for easy stock management, with all deliveries automatically tracked by Royal Mail.
With a new-and-improved iteration of the Lift Sim Manger portal released in April this year, it would be easy to assume SIMSINLifts innovation for 2025 had peaked. Yet, more innovation has followed, with the fast-ascending company raising the bar even higher to become the first ever lift sim company to offer a dedicated telephony connection for its clients. Realising that the reliable telephony infrastructure of SIMSINLift’s sister company, Prime Connect – could be of benefit to the lift companies served, SIMSINLifts revealed this first-of-its-kind collaboration in June. Founded in 2011 to bring fast fibre broadband to commercial and residential buildings around the UK via valuable pre-connection – the addition of Prime Connect’s telephony has already proven invaluable.
The key benefit of this latest advancement is that lift operators can now receive a trapped passenger’s exact location as soon as they place an emergency call, without the caller needing to say anything. This really helps to reassure callers and keep them calm, as emergency responders make their way to the rescue much more efficiently. SIMSINLifts plans to build on these unique capabilities in the near future, already developing data-driven sim solutions that could see operators able to release stuck lift doors remotely in future, for example. This is in addition to the many data benefits that will be provided to lift companies when solutions like e-Sims are incorporated into SIMSINLifts’ growing service offering.
Despite the many benefits on show, which continue to attract a growing number of lift company partners (a further 8000 lifts were onboarded this year, and SIMSINLifts is currently in talks with several industry giants), the SIMSINLifts journey has been far from plain sailing. It is only thanks to the founders’ commitment to unwavering innovation and ability to embrace calculated risk that the company has survived. Challenges ranging from other industry players beginning to follow SIMSINLifts’ lead – introducing market competitivity – to a forced change in name – have been navigated so smoothly that there were zero blips in company reputation. This pays huge testament to the quality of service and customer attention offered by SIMSINLifts, which has experienced nothing but unwavering loyalty since it started.
Sharron Barnes, Operations Manager at Griffin Elevators – one of SIMSINLifts longstanding partners – corroborates this, stating: “SIMSINLifts makes managing our sims simple and stress free”
Chaim Grunfeld, co-Founder of SIMSINLifts, couldn’t be more delighted to receive such a positive response and looks forward to the many more new developments to come – both for SIMSINLifts and the wider lift industry through the connections it has inspired.
Speaking about what it means to be nominated for the Best Use of Innovation Award, Chaim gleams: “It’s really exciting to see our many innovations recognised. We’re really dedicated to improving things for lift companies and indeed, the entire lift industry – and this latest achievement provides a wonderful boost of encouragement as we continue to do what SIMSINLifts does best: taking lift communications to the next level!”
Connect on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/simsinlifts
https://www.linkedin.com/company/prime-connect
