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 Fall 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.)
Asset Direct
Asset Direct partners with individuals and organizations, empowering them with the ability to offer their customers financial products and services – such as microloans. They are creating the world’s first truly global financial network where hundreds of thousands of global partners drive traffic to their network of thousands of financial institutions across the world. To date, their platform has established a database of 400,000+ users, generating over 7,000 loan applications weekly and over $4 million in commission from financial products sold.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$8 million
Use: With a recent launch in India, Asset Direct aims to use funds to ramp up product development and business development for the Indian market, as well as continue BD for the Canadian market. Furthermore, funds will be used to expedite the launch to the third market in Brazil.
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$1.5 million
Use: Funds will be used toward marketing, sales and continuing technological development.
BlueDot
BlueDot has built the world’s most advanced infectious disease outbreak intelligence platform. COVID-19 has awoken the world to the threat of infectious diseases and the market is primed for BlueDot to become the world’s most relied upon a single source of truth for detecting, assessing, and responding to disease outbreaks. The company has gained significant traction in the past 18 months signing on major government agencies (Canada, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.) and global enterprises (Delta Air Lines, Reckitt, etc.). The current ARR run-rate is U.S.$2.2 million with a 2.3-times YOY growth, 137-percent net retention rate, and zero logo churn. There is significant market interest in BlueDot’s offerings and it is projected to grow to $75 million ARR by 2025. BlueDot has also seen significant partnership interest and recently signed a partnership agreement with Huron Consulting as enterprises are looking to consultants to advise on disease preparedness offerings.
Round: Series A
Sector: Software/Health
Amount: CAD$19 million
Use: Approximately 43 percent of the proceeds will be used to scale BlueDot’s sales and marketing function in order to take advantage of the market opportunity. Another 42 percent will be used to further enhance the product offerings to deliver more value to clients and increase ACV. Fifteen percent will be invested in corporate operations to support rapid growth and resiliency.
Boss Insights
Boss Insights is on a mission to create the business information supply chain for B2B relationships. The company has started in two areas: fintechs that need data (a rapidly growing category including BaaS, card issuers, B.I. platforms, etc.); and private business lenders lending. There are 25,000 business lenders in North America losing market share to venture-backed fintechs because they can’t analyze loan requests efficiently. Boss Insights has processed thousands of applications for the U.S.$140 million and data calls increased 300 percent this year. Founded by an ex-Amazon manager and an RBC banker, Boss Insights is democratizing technology lenders need to compete and thrive.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S$1.5 million
Use: Funds will be used toward automation of sales and marketing to accelerate adoption, as well as hiring key talent.
Women founder(s)
ChargeLab
ChargeLab is the operating system for EV charging. The hardest part of electrification is no longer building vehicles. It’s transforming the energy system to support one billion coming EVs. ChargeLab makes EV chargers smart by connecting them to our cloud platform. Our software is actively being deployed on chargers built by seven leading manufacturers, with average Q/Q growth in new chargers connected of 123 percent. The company has grown ARR by 141 percent since closing our seed round in February.
Sector: Cleantech/software
Round: Series A
Amount: USD$15 million
Use: ChargeLab is raising Series A funding to help close software bundling agreements with Siemens, EVBox, and Leviton; increase operational capacity; grow to 5,000 chargers; ship self-serve features and a public API.
Countable
Countable is an end-to-end online platform that makes accounting simpler for small to medium-sized firms. Countable combines engagement management, document management and firm management in one centralized and integrated hub.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$2.5million
CloudTax
CloudTax is one of CRA’s NETFILE-certified applications that provides the best user experience, intuitive technology, and it’s easy to use, whether you are a first-time filer or a tax wiz. Their goal is to help millions of Canadians save money on their taxes by providing the right tools, knowledge and confidence. They have filed over 20,000 tax returns without raising capital from outside investors. With this funding round, CloudTax hopes to build its distribution channel with strategic partnerships to help more Canadians file their taxes with confidence.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Pre-seed
Amount: CAD$500,000
Use: Funds will be used towards marketing and product development.
Evotrux
Evotrux is a freight marketplace with a highly scalable business model and the most accurate data in the logistics industry. The company has a growing network of over 1,800 users across Canada and $70,000 in sales. Evotrux is raising a $1-million seed round with the following objectives for 2022: surpass 5,500 users, $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and achieve sustainable positive earnings. In 2023, the company will raise a Series A to fuel significant U.S. expansion.
Sector: Software
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1 million
Use: The funds will be used to support key hires and growth marketing efforts, including expansion into the first target U.S. market.
Funnelytics
Funnelytics helps businesses analyze and optimize their customer journeys by connecting strategy and data in one visual canvas. They are currently at $130k MRR with the right team, right growth model and right product scale quickly. eCommerce, SaaS and Education companies from all over the world like Ramsey Solutions, Vshred, Clickfunnels and thousands of other SMBs use their platform to gain insights on optimizing their customer journeys. After raising a $1.5 million seed round in April 2020, Funnelytics have found a product-market fit and now are looking for the right investors to help accelerate their growth.
Sector: Software
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$4 million
Use: Funds will be used towards expanding the engineering team, marketing, product expansion, and building the leadership team.
Fundscraper
Fundscraper is Canada’s leading private real estate investment marketplace. Over the past four years, the company has placed more than $425 million into private real state offerings across North America, with over 7,500 registered users/investors/clients. The company is capital efficient and is cash-flow positive.
Sector: Software
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$7 million
Use: Execute on the North American growth plan; double the engineering team and triple the sales team.
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 adding resources to the Customer Success and Engineering teams, supporting our current exponential growth. We’ll also add team members to Business Development, which will enhance our outbound and channel go-to-market capabilities.
Grain Discovery
Grain Discovery is creating a digital ecosystem focusing on price discovery and traceability within the agri-food supply chain. Their beachhead product is a white-label SaaS offering for grain buyers and their farmers to modernize the traditional handshake and digitize time-consuming manual processes of buying and selling grains. Their online platform features live price information, client access to their full portfolio 24/7, and enhanced communications tools. All of these save farmers and buyers time and money.
In the future, the platform will have a built-in end-to-end traceability solution that creates a “digital passport” for commodities through the entire value chain. This is vital for certification and quality assurances that are core to current and future sustainability and farm-to-fork.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$4 million
Use: Grain Discovery aims to use the funds to expand their marketing and tech team, as well as geographic expansion.
syd (iamYiam)
Leveraging preventive health research and A.I., syd (iamYiam) empowers employees to higher life quality and addresses a wide range of preventable health conditions that hamper productivity and cost corporations billions each year. Acting as an employee’s digital twin, the syd companion app delivers personalized information and actionable advice to each employee, while the employer dashboard tracks workforce health gains and ROI. Fully automated, the product stands apart in the market by tackling a full spectrum of lifestyle, health and well-being categories and conditions without the costly clinical headcount or typical medical regulatory burdens across various geographies. syd targets talent-driven organizations in industries that put a high value on staff well-being.
Sector: Software/Health
Round: Series A Equity
Amount: CAD$12 million
Use: C-suite and sales hire for the Middle East, Australia and USA operations.
Women founder(s)
JAUNTIN’
JAUNTIN’ is a white-label mobile app enabling insurers to offer their policyholders on-demand insurance products. The company helps insurers and their brokers/agents to digitize and automate insurance distribution through microservices.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: U.S$3 million
Use: To scale sales and marketing to embed insurance into additional channel partners.
LemonadeLXP
LemonadeLXP is an award-winning learning experience and digital adoption platform that drives digital adoption, fluency and transformation for financial institutions and fintechs. Using a unique combination of game-based learning, technology walkthroughs, role-play scenarios, and powerful analytics, LemonadeLXP offers a refreshing approach to corporate training that upskills remote and on-site employees faster. They currently have over 30 clients ranging from trillion-dollar institutions (USBank, TD, NAB) to community banks and credit unions. LemonadeLXP has grown by over 100% each year. In 2021, they’ve also grown ARR by 3X.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Pre-seed
Amount: CAD$2 million
Use: Proceeds will be used to fund growth, including building a larger sales organization, formalizing their partnership strategy and implementing the necessary sales and marketing tools to rapidly accelerate growth.
Micruity
Micruity powers lifetime income products in retirement plans by enabling all stakeholders to share data through a single secure connection. Various use cases, including recordkeeping, can be found here.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$6.5 million
Use: Grow the development and operations team to support client experience.
ODAIA
ODAIA offers an AI-powered Customer Data Platform (CDP) that delivers unparalleled commercial insights to the pharmaceutical industry. It brings together both proprietary and public data sources to analyze and predict patient journeys, physician prescribing behaviour and omnichannel attribution, to deliver real-time insights to sales and marketing teams, so they can create hyper-personalized customer engagements. The platform is being used by 3 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies by global revenues as well as by multiple mid-sized companies across various disease areas. ODAIA has partnered with large multinational firms, including PwC and Dentsu/Merkle Health for go-to-market opportunities.
Sector: Software
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$10 million
Use: ODAIA is planning to use the funds to expand their sales, customer success, and engineering teams, and grow into more geographies.
Women founder(s)
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: Seed
Amount: CAD$1 million
Use: Funds will be used to onboard 30 live enterprise payout customers, and launch new customer-validated features that will increase margin and expose them to new markets.
PontoSense
Pontosense is a non-invasive sensor utilizing cutting-edge millimetre wave spectrum radar technology that can detect the presence, classify users, and measure both heart rate and respiration rate. Applications are used for automotive, smart home, and other safety/health applications. The founding team has over 500 patents in wireless communications and the sensor is the most accurate human sensor in the world. They also have strong IP and technical bench strength. They currently have multiple pilot projects with large OEMs. Enterprise customers include Aisin, Lixil, Continental, Project Arrow, and Canoo. They currently have multiple pilot projects with large OEMs.
Sector: Enterprise & Health
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$6.5million
Use: Funds will be used towards tripling the engineering team and mass deployment.
Rewatt Power
ReWatt helps independent power producers to be more profitable by reducing transaction costs and by simplifying once complex and manual processes. Inefficiency in the power markets costs clean power producers up to 50% of their potential revenue, and ReWatt uses blockchain technology to reduce these losses. They have a live, commercial blockchain pilot with large utilities in Canada including ENMAX and Capital Power, operate in the US, and have over 400 solar generation sites on our platform. The company is operating in a large potential market, so they are riding a rising trend.
Sector: Software/Cleantech
Round: Series A
Amount: CAD$3 million
Use: Proceeds will go towards product scalability, US sales and customer acquisition, renewable sales, and customer onboarding.
Women founder(s)
Riskfuel
Riskfuel accelerates financial models that banks use to calculate the values and risks of their derivatives portfolios. These models are run millions of times daily, typically in large overnight batch processes spread over thousands of servers. Riskfuel makes these models a million times faster. What once took all night to run can now be completed in seconds. Riskfuel gives traders real-time valuation and risk management with massive savings in compute workload, reducing costs and carbon emissions. In January 2021, the company’s first customer, Scotiabank, went live with Riskfuel-accelerated models. Recently, the Bank of Montreal announced its partnership with Riskfuel after a successful pilot. Riskfuel is currently working on pilots with several global banks.
Sector: Software/Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$12 million
Use: The funds will be used to transform Riskfuel’s product from building custom models into do-it-yourself acceleration tools to allow customers to accelerate their own models.
Women founder(s)
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: Software/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.
Swob
Swob is an award-winning recruitment software helping employers in high-turnover industries hire local talent. For job seekers, they use the app that works similar to Tinder swipe right to apply to jobs and left to ignore. To date, the company is working with clients such as Sobeys, McDonald’s, Leon’s Furniture, Ghost Kitchens, Harvey’s and many more. In 2018, Swob was named the first Canadian company to win Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Mobile Canada’s Pitch to Rich contest. Swob is across Canada with over 30,000 active users, and in June of 2021, recently entered the United States with a focus on Austin.
Sector: Software
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$150,000
Use: Swob would put the investment toward business development and expansion. The company would focus on U.S. expansion and continue to promote Swob to both job seekers and employers. The investment would allow Swob to automate work and focus time and efforts on lead generation and making new connections and strategic partnerships.
Women founder(s)
Synapse
Synapse improves the capacity of learning and development teams by streamlining training intake, project planning and content authoring. The first-of-its-kind platform automates the instructional design process, allowing organizations to quickly transform institutional knowledge into on-demand training; software streamlines end-to-end learning ops on one shared platform. ARR is in 500K – $1M range. Clients include Staples, Home Depot, The Washington Post, CVS Health.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: USD$2 million
Use: Funds will be used to secure category leadership for “LearnOps” and to scale enterprise adoption.
The Owl Solutions
Owl Solutions helps manufacturing and distribution companies deal with supply chain disruptions. In mid-2020, they launched The Owl, a supply chain data analytics platform for midsize businesses. The Owl enables customers with real-time monitoring, early detection, and rectification of performance anomalies by providing visibility and transparency into inventories, purchase spend, supplier reliability, operating costs, and risks. Their ARR has grown 5x YOY up to $250K in 2021 by acquiring eight enterprise-level customers in Canada, US and Mexico. Their customers include leading brands such as Jamieson Wellness, Canada Goose, Eneos, AutoZone, Nutresa and others. Now, the company is raising US$1M to accelerate its growth to achieve $2.5M in ARR in 2022.
Sector: Software
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1.25 million
Use: The company plans on using the funds towards marketing, sales, customer success hires, product support, and resources for the app.
VoPay
VoPay is a data-driven payment transformation company. It builds innovative products that reduce friction in B2B payments and enable near real-time processing.
Sector: Fintech
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$3 million
Use: Working capital to hire marketing/sales staff and build out the product.
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, manage 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.
VigilantCS
VigilantCS (VCS) is a staff conduct risk platform, currently focused on the Canadian financial services market. Due to changes, regulators are focused on assessing compliant behaviour and improving supervision. To support financial services firms, VCS has introduced an end-to-end staff platform through a) VCS Change Manager; which uses AI to monitor regulatory change, document controls and test their effectiveness b) VCSOpen; which automates core staff compliance requirements and c) VCSPro; that works to ingest staff VCSOpen and third-party data to generate staff conduct risk score and management reporting allowing for risk-based reviews. Currently, VigilantCS has over 23 clients and 5 national and international sales channels.
Sector: Enterprise
Round: Seed
Amount: CAD$1.5 million
Use: Funds will be used towards operations, research and development, sales, and marketing.
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$8.5 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.