The mindfulness adage, “wherever you go, there you are” rang true for Inovia in Q3 — as we deepened our practice of backing exceptional founders in sectors we have studied deeply.
We extended our hospitality thesis as we invested in Sonder’s $225M round. The novel homeshare-inspired hospitality company, led by Montreal natives, is poised to disrupt both the hotel and homeshare markets. We also strengthened our partnership with funding platform Clearbanc, who raised $50M for growth, plus a $250M fund. We also applied our decentralization thesis in backing digital asset custody provider KNØX.
We kicked off our Inovia Sessions event series in San Francisco with Patrick hosting Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher, followed a few weeks later with Chris hosting Lenny Ratchitsky for an intimate conversation with founders from the Inovia community.
— The team at Inovia Capital
In the News
- Sonder’s new $225M raise and $1B valuation reflect the growing demand for homeshare-style rentals with the support and consistency of a hotel. | TechCrunch
- Fellow launched on Product Hunt and quickly gained over 1000 upvotes. Join the convo! | ProductHunt
- AppDirect was named to the Cloud 100 for the fourth straight year | BusinessWire
- North has increased access to its smartglasses with a fitting app called Showroom. | VentureBeat
- Clearbanc shows how their data-backed funding process removes bias and leads to tangible increases in loans to female founders | Fortune
- Vidyard opened up its video marketing platform with free plans, ideal for SMBs | Betakit
- Bench Accounting has strengthened its market position and growth horizon | Daily Hive
- Armored Things announced that Julie Johnson will transition from President to CEO, while Charles Curran will fill that role | PE Hub
- Digital asset custody service provider KNØX launched, and announced a C$8.25M funding | Betakit
Thoughts
- AppDirect’s 10 Year Overnight Success Story | Blog
- Putting Entrepreneurs First: Clearbanc Pioneers Access to Fast, Affordable Capital | Blog
- Accelerating AI with Computational Storage | Blog
- Forecasting Wha
t Matters | Blog - Sonder Scales the Personalized and Instagrammable Era of Hospitality | Blog
Industry Insights
- Crunchbase featured Claire Tomkins from Future Family, in a valuable discussion of how venture could improve access for visible minorities.
- Forbes touched on the valuable contributions that companies like Workfusion — who reside in complementary sectors — have on healthcare delivery.
- CBInsights released this fun and well-done mapping of Canadian tech startups, and we enjoyed seeing 15 of our investments featured.
- Wired relied on the experience of Dr. Alex Wong in exploring the potential biases in AI based on the ImageNet project.
Events
- September 17, Montreal: Patrick & Dennis joined AppDirect at their annual Engage conference to inspire leaders of digital transformation.
- September 18, Montreal: Chris spoke at Réseau PDG 2019
- September 26, Montreal: Chris presented the Inovia view of how to build tech giants in Canada at the CIBC Annual Technology Tour.
- October 1, London: Patrick hosts a CFO roundtable with the Xoogler community.
- October 16, Toronto: Dennis joins Kensington Capital at their AGM.
- October 16, Toronto: Chris and Dax will appear at CIX for a fireside chat on the company’s great growth story.
- November 4, Montreal: Patrick is giving a keynote at the Teralys AGM.
- November 6, Montreal: Patrick is giving a keynote at the National Bank Annual Employee Conference in Montreal.
- November 12–13, San Francisco: We’ll welcome 3 great speakers and 15 portfolio engineering leads to join us at the Inovia CTO Summit.
- November 22–23, Helsinki: Patrick and Dax will be onstage for a very unique engagement at Slush. Let us know if you’ll be there!