MaRS Enterprise and Fintech Ventures – Who’s Raising?
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The following companies in the MaRS Enterprise & Fintech network are looking for financing in Q3 2021. If you would like to receive more information about a venture for the purpose of investing, feel free to contact the companies directly or send an email to: ecosystem@marsdd.com.
(Note: MaRS is a non-profit entity and does not take fees or equity from any capital raised by the companies in our venture network.)
Argentum Electronics Inc.
Argentum saves buildings up to 40% in energy consumption on LED lighting and HVAC systems through a mix of their patented high-efficiency DC (direct current) power distribution systems, and their self-optimizing building automation algorithms. They deploy a mix of high and low voltage DC transmission, wireless sensor networks, and digital twin software to clients’ buildings to save them on both project capital costs (higher voltage, lower current – the same amount of power, but less copper!), and system operating costs. Thus far, they have two granted patents, sold close to $100K in demos and pilots to a few of Canada’s largest construction and real estate development firms, and have built a pipeline of over 45 customers around the world.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$2.15 million
Use: Funds will be put towards growing their customer base and sales pipeline in Canada, U.S.A, Europe, and Hong Kong. The funds will also be put towards perfecting their product, growing their engineering and sales teams, and ultimately getting themselves in a position to raise Series A financing.
Arima
Arima built a privacy-preserving synthetic data generation algorithm to help companies make their data less siloed and more powerful.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S.$2 million
Use: They plan to use this fund to expand operations to the US, including acquiring US datasets to develop the US Synthetic Society and sales team. They also want to reach $260k MRR within 18 months of closing their seed round and be ready for Series A. 50% of this raise will go towards sales/marketing, and 35% will go towards engineering.
Aux Mode
Aux Mode is a provider of digital rights management and SaaS-based revenue reporting software enabling its customers to effectively protect and monetize their online content. The company serves studios, distributors, producers, brands, and right holders on YouTube and recently developed a patent-pending revenue reporting tool that leverages AI & machine Learning to expedite revenue reporting across AVOD streaming platforms. Aux Mode is also the first and only cloud-based solution for AVOD revenue reporting leveraging AI & machine learning.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: U.S.$10 million
Use: Funds will be used towards hiring, marketing, advertising and PR.
Women founder(s)
Blue Pier
Blue Pier is Canada’s first pension plan as a service. Partnered with RBC Global Asset Management, they bring the first “virtual” pension plan to Canada’s 1.2 million workplaces, from coast to coast to coast. Lean, institutional, and technology-enabled, they offer a value proposition in a $3.7 trillion asset market that’s overdue for innovative disruption. In the market now with a highly competitive MVP, Blue Pier is ready to scale.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$7 million
Use: Funds will be used towards digital, print, and media marketing/lead generation. Furthermore, funds will be used to direct sales staff, client fulfillment, and continuing technological development.
Boss Insights
Boss Insights is on a mission to create the business information supply chain underpinning B2B relationships. They’ve started with business lending where there are 25,000 business lenders in North America losing market share to venture-backed FinTechs because they can’t analyze loan requests efficiently. Utilizing Boss Insights, new players decide on loans in under 24hrs while others take weeks or months. They plug Boss Insights into their process empowering them to compete in the market. Founded by an ex-Amazon software manager & an RBC banker, Boss Insights is democratizing the technology lenders need to compete and thrive.
Sector: Enterprise/Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S$3 million
Use: Having secured early traction and built a sales process, the purpose of the round is to scale sales to get to a critical point so they can own the category.
Women-founder(s)
Cloudamart
Cloudamart is building a local marketplace where they digitalize inventory from local businesses and provides them a technology that allows users to purchase and have products fulfilled within 1 hour.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$15 million
Use: Funds will be used towards growth, expansion, marketing, and technology enhancement for more business lines.
Contractor Compliance
Contractor Compliance automates the management of third-party contractor/supplier/vendor requirements for over 100 global customers and over 50,000 users. Supporting clients in over a dozen industries since 2018, Contractor Compliance has $2M+ ARR (CAD) with a 125% net revenue retention rate and a 97% logo retention rate.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$4 million
Use: Funds will be used for the following: senior leadership (VP Revenue, CTO, VP Customer Success), sales & marketing headcount/resources & development headcount.
Deeded
Deeded is building the new standard for Real Estate transactions. They combine advanced technology with deep human expertise to remove the friction, frustration, and expense of closing a Real Estate or Mortgage transaction for consumers, lenders, and Proptech companies. Since launching in May 2020, they delivered a superior closing experience to thousands of happy homeowners, closing over $800M in transactions on their platform. They grew revenues 24% monthly completely organically and recently launched in Alberta and BC, following their initial launch in the Ontario market.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S$5 million
Use: Funds will be used towards expansion to new markets, expand the technology platform, and grow the team.
Women-founder(s)
EAIGLE Inc.
EAIGLE is an A.I. software company offering vision-based solutions for crowd monitoring and occupancy data analytics specific to indoor/outdoor public places and high-foot traffic facilities, such as retail stores, shopping malls, entertainment, logistics, and distribution centers and workplaces. EAIGLE analyzes the live CCTV camera feeds through its edge processing units in real-time to monitor people non-invasively and anonymously. It then maps the density of people over the layout of the facility/area. EAIGLE optimizes employee and visitor management, enhances health and safety, simplifies capacity management, and automates wellness screening with its solutions.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A/equity & debt
Amount: CAD$3 million
Use: Funds will be used to keep up with the market demand and expand the market in the U.S. EAIGLE has so far deployed its solution in more than 750 facilities across the U.S. and Canada. The company had exponential growth of greater than 500 percent CAGR through its expansion within the U.S. and Canada.
Evotrux
Evotrux provides shippers and carriers with free access to a sophisticated freight-matching marketplace. Data collected from the matching platform is repurposed into business intelligence products and multiple revenue streams. So far, their traction is over 1650 users, 7% user growth, month-over-month, and 99.42% lifetime user retention rate. Furthermore, they have lowered their cost of user acquisition by 75% so far in 2021 and have over $3.5M worth of transactions have been booked on Evotrux. The company has also pre-sold 50 premium subscriptions to transactional data tools and secured an initial business intelligence contract with Transport Canada.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S.$3 million
Use: Funds will be used to add key staff (senior devs, data scientists, product designers, sales) and to increase user growth. Over the next 24 months, they plan to launch their mobile app, get real-time access to driver/truck locations, launch their business intelligence portal, significantly monetize data within Canada, and enter multiple key hubs in the U.S. market.
GrowerIQ
GrowerIQ is building the first cannabis seed-to-sale tracking platform to integrate all facility systems in one place. As the only platform designed from the perspective of a Master Grower (from Tilray & MedReleaf), GrowerIQ is more intuitive and representative of real-world best practices than other non-cannabis ERPs. Their customers reduced their compliance risk by moving to entirely digital operations and saved two weeks of Quality Assurance time every month by generating Health Canada compliance reports of 2000+ columns with one click. GrowerIQ is now the business backbone for Licensed Producers across Canada and in 7 countries around the world, growing to $1M in ARR over 12 months. Funds will be allocated toward expanding the Engineering and Customer Success teams to support exponential growth (current year SaaS revenue tracking at 236% of last year) and enhancing their professional services capabilities, which delivered $500k in cannabis consulting last year.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1.2million
Use: Funds will be used to scaling up engineering and support teams to service the exponential growth of the new business.
GrowthGenius
GrowthGenius gets companies more closed deals, faster. Their automated sales prospecting platform is used by over 1,000 customers to find the perfect prospects and automatically reach out to them with personalized messages and follow-ups. The current MRR of $110k is up over 100% from December 2020.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$4 million
Use: Funds would be used to accelerate sales and marketing activities. Additional product development would be focused on finishing the last few features required to secure more customers utilizing 30 – 100 licenses each ($3k – $10k MRR, each). Concurrently, GG would hire senior sales account executives and a VP of marketing to ramp up the acquisition and onboarding of larger license deals.
Lorica Cybersecurity
Lorica enterprise software enables private, secure data analytics in the cloud using a breakthrough encryption technology (FHE) now being standardized by ISO. The cloud is not secure as corporate data is exposed during computation; their products close this attack surface. They work discreetly with government agencies and financial institutions, have $1M+ in revenue, have signed their first subscription agreement, and plan to deliver the first product to market this year. They are a well-funded startup of 16 in Toronto and Maryland that plans their first venture round to scale sales and product delivery.
Sector: Enterprise/Fintech
Round: Series A (equity)
Amount: U.S.$20 million
Use: Funds will be used to scale sales, product delivery, and engineering teams.
MetaVRse
MetaVRse is a code-optional platform that makes it easy to create & share interactive 3D experiences instantly to over 7 billion compatible devices on the web. Their clients include Samsung, Siemens, Mastercard, JP Morgan Est. They have a $3M in 2021 revenue and 240% y/y growth.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: U.S.$7.5 million
Use: Funds will be used towards growth and product development.
Women founder(s)
Optimity
Optimity is a SaaS platform for life insurance companies to drive customer engagement. They provide an all-in-1 solution to help life insurance companies differentiate their product, carve out captive channels, use unique data to trigger new sales opportunities, and attract and retain their best customers. They currently work with 7 of the largest life insurance companies in North American (including a top 3 carrier in Canada and a top 4 carrier in the US). Over the last 12 months, their average monthly user growth is 31%. Their revenue grew 7x growth in 2020 and is on track to over 2x their revenue growth in 2021.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A (equity)
Amount: U.S.$10 million
Use: The funds will be used to expand into their existing clients, add new clients, improve monetization and product development.
Women founder(s)
Orbiseed
Orbiseed‘s SaaS platform speeds up document processing by 200 times using their patent-pending AI technology to assist estimators in quantity takeoff for pre-construction. This saves time, reduces risk, and allows estimators to focus on the work that matters. Orbiseed has grown very fast since its inception in 2019 and is currently a 20+ people team, with many with experiences in tech companies like Amazon, Netsuite, Oracle, etc. Orbiseed was part of Techstars in 2020 and Google Accelerator in 2021. Orbiseed has a world record-breaking ML algorithm and is endorsed by Mila and Joshua Bengio.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Late seed
Amount: U.S.$3 million
Use: Funds will be used to invest in marketing and sales to achieve $5 MM ARR, improve the product user experience, find strategic business collaborations, fund more R&D, and file for additional patents.
OTI Lumionics Inc.
OTI is a materials discovery company with a computational materials design platform-driven with quantum computing simulations that accelerates time to market for advanced materials and fine chemicals (e.g., electronics, catalysts, batteries, bio-pharma). The quantum computing simulations have demonstrated superior accuracy and are the only quantum methods that can be used for commercial materials/chemistry problems, today, using classical hardware. The fabless business model is highly scalable, enables rapid entry into multiple new markets, and is backed by a comprehensive global network of leading chemical companies. Existing global customers are top tier market leaders and collectively account for >95% global market share of consumer devices
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series B (equity)
Amount: U.S$75 million
Use: Funds will be used towards working capital and market expansion.
Phaze
Issuing payouts to users internationally is expensive and complex due to unique country-by-country compliance. Phaze is a prepaid payout API, trusted by multi-billion-dollar banks like crypto.com and 10M+ users. They enable users from 134 countries to receive digital payouts from over 2,000 prepaid brands including Visa and MasterCard. There are no brand approvals and offer simple tech enforced compliance that enables companies to go global in hours not months. In Q2 2021, Phaze processed more than $2.1M in prepaid payouts from four live customers and has ten others going live soon.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Equity seed
Amount: U.S.$300k
Use: Funds will be used to hire business developers to help bring 65 customers in the pipeline, along with engineers to help launch new customer-validated features that will increase margin and expose them to new markets.
Plendify
Plendify is a B2B marketplace platform that enables businesses across Africa to buy and sell in a secure, reliable, and trusted way. B2B sales in Africa is a broken and highly fragmented and inefficient process. This is exacerbated by the lack of transparency especially when it comes to quality, pricing, and reliability. Plendify’s MVP was released in April 2020, the beta app was launched in October 2020, the full end-to-end platform was launched in May 2021, and they crossed 1000+ suppliers and 10K downloads in the month of May 2021.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S.700k
Use: Funding is going to be used primarily to recruit a regional salesforce in key markets, expand their client success team, growing the marketing team. They are also looking to open the platform to other regional countries such as Rwanda.
Soundpays
Soundpays is a cutting-edge mobile engagement solution utilizing patented ultrasonic sound technology to digitally connect audiences directly to any media in real-time. Ideal for the retail, sports, entertainment, and broadcasting sectors, viewers can interact with the content that they are seeing or hearing and respond to call-to-actions, including instant, single-touch purchases. Soundpays’ “see now – buy now” capability offers a profound opportunity to convert customers in the “power-of-the-moment” and then generate unified attribution data from initial media touchpoints to eventual purchase.
Sector: Enterprise/Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1.6 million
Use: To grow their technical team for executing on the product roadmap, including R&D work which will generate 1-5 new patents and develop the specialized technology required for N.A. TV and FM broadcasters. Additionally, the funding will be used to add support teams for market launches with big brands in their pipeline in North America and Japan; including opening offices in California and Japan.
Synapse
Synapse helps companies around the world improve the productivity of their corporate learning and development teams. This first-of-its-kind software allows customers to get better visibility into the training needs of their businesses and consolidate the disparate tools they are using so they can access capacity data for better decision making and author course content with unprecedented speed. Founded in 2015, Synapse has clients in multiple sectors and is based out of Toronto with offices in San Diego and Merida, Mexico.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$8 million
Use: Funds will be used to secure category leadership and scale enterprise adoption.
Videolinq
Videolinq is a centralized workspace solution for teams to create unique live broadcast experiences on multiple social media platforms by interacting with viewers and collecting insight data analytics showing engagement and marketing growth.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S.$1 million
Use: Funds will be used over 18 months to hire new employees and pay for sales and marketing efforts (70%), continue development (20%), and support additional infrastructure (10%).
Virgil Systems
Virgil Systems ensures secure and trusted data and communications in a world increasingly threatened by rogue and nation-state attackers. They have advanced the state of the art of distributed ledger technology and information theory to create a platform where any application can operate with full assurance of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. They serve critical government applications, which face unique challenges when operating in hostile and untrusted networks, fueling a 300% yearly growth since 2018. Virgil Systems is expanding into new government use-cases and critical commercial sectors.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Late seed
Amount: U.S.$5 million
Use: They will use the proceeds to accelerate satisfy existing and growing integration requests by original equipment manufacturers in smart cities, managed data transfers, military missions, and secure file storage. They will expand their technology team to invest in the long-term vision of product-embedded deployment within communications infrastructure. Funds will also be used to expand their executive business team.
WALO
WALO is a NextAI venture focused on empowering parents to teach their kids about money using allowances, behavioral guidance, and gamification. Traction includes 1600 new users in one month after launch acquired at less than C$3. The team includes experienced leadership including KPMG, Desjardins, Amazon, LogMeIn. Key partners powering their solution include Desjardins, and the National Bank of Canada (Finaptic).
Sector: Fintech
Round: Pre-seed, SAFE
Amount: CAD$1 million
Use: Funds will be used to acquire customers and boost the engineering team.
Women founder(s)
WorkTango
1 in 4 workers is considering quitting their job after the pandemic. Only 36% of the workplace is currently engaged, and 64% are either miserable in their role or simply going through the motions. WorkTango helps organizations create employee experiences that their people love; enabling them to engage and retain the world’s top talent. Their passion is to improve work lives. Traction includes 170+ clients, including Rexall, City of Toronto, Ugg, and Pizza Pizza. They are on target for $3.1M ARR this year (70% YoY growth being 100% bootstrapped) and have 94% client retention.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$6-9 million
Use: Funds will be used towards sales, marketing, research and development, client success, and operating experiences. With an investment in this range, they are confident they can deliver $13 million+ in ARR in the next 18-24 months.
DISCLAIMER: MaRS disclaims any and all liability in the event any information supplied here proves to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or results in any investment or other losses. The information here is believed reliable, however MaRS does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of such information. MaRS is a non-profit that does not collect fees from any capital raised by companies in our venture network.