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
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 the customer base and sales pipeline in Canada, U.S.A, Europe, and Hong Kong. The funds will also be put toward perfecting the product, growing engineering and sales teams, and ultimately getting in a position to raise Series A financing.
Arima
Arima has developed 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: The company plans to use this fund to expand operations to the U.S., including acquiring U.S. datasets to develop the U.S. Synthetic Society and sales team. Arima also wants to reach $260,000 MRR within 18 months of closing its seed round and be ready for Series A. Fifty percent of this raise will go toward sales/marketing, and 35 percent will go toward 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 rights holders on YouTube and recently developed a patent-pending revenue reporting tool that leverages A.I. and 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 A.I. and machine learning.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: U.S.$10 million
Use: Funds will be used towards hiring, marketing, advertising, and P.R.
Women founder(s)
Blue Pier
Blue Pier is Canada’s first pension plan as a service. Partnered with RBC Global Asset Management, the venture brings the first “virtual” pension plan to Canada’s 1.2 million workplaces, from coast to coast to coast. Lean, institutional, and technology-enabled, Blue Pier offers 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 toward 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. The company has 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 24 hours 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 and 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 to own the category.
Women-founder(s)
Cloudamart
Cloudamart is building a local marketplace that digitizes inventory from local businesses, providing them with a technology that allows users to purchase and have products fulfilled within one hour.
Sector: Enterprise/Fintech
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$15 million
Use:Funds will be used toward 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 more than CAD$2 million in ARR, with a 125-percent net-revenue retention rate, and a 97-percent logo-retention rate.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$4 million
Use: Funds will be used for senior leadership (V.P. of revenue, CTO, V.P. of customer success), sales and marketing headcount/resources, and development headcount.
Deeded
Deeded is building the new standard for real-estate transactions. The company combines 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, Deeded has delivered a superior closing experience to thousands of happy homeowners, closing over $800 million in transactions on its platform. The company grew revenues by 24 percent monthly and was recently launched in Alberta and B.C., following its initial launch in the Ontario market.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S$5 million
Use: Funds will be used toward expansion to new markets, expanding the technology platform, and growing 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, the company’s traction is over 1650 users, seven-percent user growth month-over-month, and a 99.42-percent lifetime user retention rate. Furthermore, the company has lowered its cost of user acquisition by 75 percent so far in 2021 and has over $3.5-million-worth of transactions 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 developers, data scientists, product designers, salespeople) and to increase user growth. Over the next 24 months, Evotrux plans to launch its mobile app, get real-time access to driver/truck locations, launch its 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 and MedReleaf), GrowerIQ is more intuitive and representative of real-world best practices than other non-cannabis ERPs. Its 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 more than 2000 columns with one click. GrowerIQ is now the business backbone for licensed producers across Canada and in seven countries around the world, growing to $1 million in ARR over 12 months.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1.08million
Use: Funds will be allocated toward expanding the engineering and customer success teams to support exponential growth (current year SaaS revenue is tracking at 236 percent of last year), and enhancing professional services capabilities, which delivered $500,000 in cannabis consulting last year.
GrowthGenius
GrowthGenius gets companies more closed deals, faster. Its 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 $110,000 is up over 100-percent 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 to 100 licenses each ($3,000 to $10,000 MRR, each). Concurrently, GrowthGenius would hire senior sales account executives and a V.P. 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; Lorica products close this attack surface. The company works discreetly with government agencies and financial institutions, has more than $1 million in revenue, has signed its first subscription agreement, and plans to deliver the first product to market this year. Lorica is a well-funded startup of 16 employees based in Toronto and Maryland. The company is planning its 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 and share interactive 3D experiences instantly to over seven billion compatible devices on the web. The company’s clients include Samsung, Siemens, Mastercard, and J.P. Morgan. MetaVRse boasts $3 million in 2021 revenue and 240-percent year-over-year 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 that helps life insurance companies drive customer engagement. The company provides an all-in-one 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. Optimity currently works with seven of the largest life insurance companies in North America (including a top-three carrier in Canada and a top-four carrier in the U.S.). Over the last 12 months, the company’s average monthly user growth is 31 percent. Its revenue grew seven times in 2020 and is on track to grow more than two times in 2021.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A (equity)
Amount: U.S.$10 million
Use: The funds will be used to better serve 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 its patent-pending A.I. 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 team of more than 20 people, many with experiences at tech companies like Amazon, NetSuite, Oracle, etc. Orbiseed was part of Techstars in 2020 and Google Accelerator in 2021. The company has a world-record-breaking machine-learning algorithm and is endorsed by Mila and Yoshuo 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-million ARR, improve the product user experience, find strategic business collaborations, fund more R&D, and file for additional patents.
OTI
OTI is a materials-discovery company with a computational-materials design platform, driven by quantum computing simulations that accelerate time to market for advanced materials and fine chemicals (electronics, catalysts, batteries, biopharma, etc.). 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 roughly 95 percent of the 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, with more than 10 million users. The company enables users from 134 countries to receive digital payouts from over 2,000 prepaid brands including Visa and MasterCard. There are no brand approvals, and Phaze offers simple tech-enforced compliance that enables companies to go global in hours, not months. In Q2 2021, Phaze processed more than $2.1 million in prepaid payouts from four live customers and has 10 others going live soon.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Equity seed
Amount: U.S.$300,000
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 the company crossed 1000 suppliers and 10,000 downloads that same month.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S.$700,000
Use: Funding is going to be used primarily to recruit a regional salesforce in key markets, expand the client success team and grow the marketing team. Plendify is 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. The company’s “see now; buy now” capability offers a profound opportunity to convert customers quickly and then generate unified attribution data from initial media touchpoints to eventual purchases.
Sector: Enterprise/Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1.6 million
Use: Funds will be used to grow the technical team for executing the product roadmap, including R&D work which will generate one to five new patents, and develop the specialized technology required for N.A. T.V. and F.M. broadcasters. Additionally, the funding will be used to add support teams for market launches with big brands in the 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. This allows for better decision-making and authoring 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 Mérida, 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. In 2020, the company grew from 50 to over 600 subscribers and passed $135,000 in revenues.
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. The company has advanced 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. The company serves critical government applications, which face unique challenges when operating in hostile and untrusted networks, fueling a 300-percent 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: The proceeds will help process existing and growing integration requests by original equipment manufacturers in smart cities, managed data transfers, military missions, and secure file storage. Virgil Systems will also expand its technology team to invest in the long-term vision of product-embedded deployment within communications infrastructure. Funds will also be used to expand the executive business team.
WALO
WALO is a venture focused on empowering parents to teach their kids about money using allowances, behavioral guidance, and gamification. Traction includes 1,600 new users in one month, while the team includes leadership with experience at KPMG, Desjardins, Amazon, and LogMeIn. Key partners powering the company’s 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
One in four workers is considering quitting their job after the pandemic. Only 36 percent of the workplace is currently engaged, and 64 workers are either miserable in their roles 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. The company’s passion is to improve work lives. Traction includes more than 170 clients, including Rexall, City of Toronto, Ugg, and Pizza Pizza. WorkTango is on target for $3.1 million in ARR this year (70-percent year-over-year growth being 100-percent bootstrapped) and has 94-percent client retention.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$6 to 9 million
Use: Funds will be used toward sales, marketing, research and development, client success, and operating experiences. With an investment in this range, the company is confident it can deliver more than $13 million in ARR in the next 18 to 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.