See how we’re expanding our reach and setting the stage for decades ahead.
Seeds that were planted so long ago came into full bloom in Q1 — and while most of you have been closely connected to our growth story, we would like to highlight a few of the threads which we see as foundational for the decade ahead.
First, we announced our combined $600M (CA$800M) early and growth stage funds, plus strengthened teams across Canada, San Francisco, and London; bringing the full-stack capabilities we offer startups into full view. Soon after, portfolio company Lightspeed held its IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange (Ticker: LSPD), becoming the largest Canadian tech IPO in nine years. Together, these announcements underscore the strength and potential of the Canadian tech ecosystem, and our vision for helping great companies to become global tech leaders.
In a parallel move, Patrick brought the Creative Destruction Lab to the UK, having co-founded the latest Oxford chapter alongside amazing entrepreneurs and builders Peter Davies and John McCall MacBain. With this new endeavor and a role as Chairman of Oxford Sciences Innovation, Patrick is strengthening Inovia’s connections to the UK ecosystem, to the benefit of founders everywhere.
We are also excited to share with you our new office space in San Francisco, our new location in South Park; and our team has dug deep to bring you a great lineup of thought leadership on our blog. As always, we look forward to seeing you soon, and don’t forget to stop by our San Francisco, London, Toronto or Montreal offices to say hi!
In the News
- Supporting the launch of our new funds, the Globe & Mail and Montreal Gazette offered features, and Chris appeared on RDI Canada, while Dennis stopped by BNN. 🚀
- Patrick talked with Business Insider and Telegraph UK about the strength of the UK ecosystem and appeared again in Forbes and Telegraph UK when his CDL and OSI initiatives were launched. 🚀
- Augmented reality company Spatial joined Microsoft on stage at Mobile World Congress with an impressive demo. | ZDNet & BBC 🕶️
- Forbes featured DarwinAI team members in a three-part a series about AI: Is AI Headed for Another Winter?, Deep Learning: When Should You Use It?, What You Need to Know About Machine Learning
- North made a big splash at CES this year, with coverage from CNBC and Wired; the company also began shipping the first batch of glasses. | TechVibes 🕶️
- TrackTik announced their US $45M raise with Inovia’s co-investors CDPQ and Georgian Partners. | Globe & Mail 💰
- Future Family founder Dr. Claire Tomkins was named on a Forbes list of great women in tech and is quoted in Thrive Global as saying “Now is the golden age” for women to start companies. 🚀
- Bench Accounting founder Ian Crosby’s “Automatable from day one” mindset has led the company to be over 91% accurate in all its categorizations today. | Globe & Mail 🤖
- Clearbanc’s Michelle Romanow announced that she is part of the
2019 Class of Young Global Leaders — a division of the World Economic Forum. 🚀 - Bus ticketing platform Busbud expanded into Turkey, and trucking bypass company Drivewyze expanded into Ontario. 🚌
- Congrats to Smooch for winning Best Chat/Conversational Bot Tool at the 2019 MarTech Awards! 🏆
Thoughts
- Special thanks to all for participating in our 2019 International Women’s Day initiative! We continue to be honored to work with such diverse teams and hope you all enjoyed creating your own videos. Check out the compilation video and blog post featuring tips from SnapTravel, Armored Things, and Busbud.
- Leveraging Board Meetings to Reinforce a Hypothesis-Driven Culture, by Hugues | Blog 🗒️
- A Founder’s Guide to Venture Debt, by Sarah | Blog 🏦
- Crafting Our Own Venture Model As A Full-Stack Venture Firm | Blog 🚀
- The Cardinal Rules of Buy-Side M&A, by Scott | PEHub ✍️
- Diligence from Day One, by Scott | PEHub ✍️
- Lenny Ratchisky, founder of Localmind, talks about lessons learned from seven years at AirBnB after his company’s 2012 acquisition. It’s 13 minutes of very well-spent reading time. 💥
Industry News
Big congrats to Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton for winning the 2019 Turing Award — a well-earned honor that stitches Europe with Canada together in a pattern of great leadership! | NYTimes 🏆
Events
- Appdirect announced that “ENGAGE — Digital Economy Summit 2019” will be held in Montreal from September 16th to the 18th, 2019.