As we enter the new year, we are humbled by the challenges and opportunities that 2020 brought to the tech ecosystem, on both business and personal/family fronts. Like so many of you, we were heads-down for the last quarter of 2020 — working behind the scenes with all portfolio companies to make gains for them and our communities.
We were pleased to support Sonder in building their plan for 700 new jobs in Montreal and seeing AppDirect dive in and scale their Canadian operations. Inovia grew as well, welcoming new team members in Canada — Montreal Office Manager Natalie Sztyk and Analyst Kelly Jacques, as well as Executive in Residence Rosie Chopra in San Francisco, and London intern Jules Pichette. We’re also still hiring — see here for details.
We hope you had a safe and restful end to 2020 and look forward to building new pathways forward with you in 2021
— The team at Inovia Capital
P.S. Check out 2020 activity summary shared as part of our holiday best wishes!
In the news
- DarwinAI announced new strategic funding from Honeywell | Business Wire
- AppDirect’s $250M raise constituted more than half of all funding in Montreal in Q3 | BetaKit
- Sonder announces $23M to build out Apartment Hotels from their Montreal HQ | Skift
- As part of this expansion, Sonder will create 700 jobs in Montreal | CBC
- Symend co-founders make the “Compelling Calgarians” list | Calgary Herald
- AppDirect: Stingray monétise sa participation | La valeur d’AppDirect explose | La Presse
- AppDirect: Stingray monetizes its stake | AppDirect’s value explodes | The Canadian
Industry Insights
- Check out this compensation analysis from Shareworks
- Vidyard found that video messaging is up 471%, while announcing new Slack integrations | Business Wire
- The pandemic has deeply impacted public transportation — but will it come back, and how? | The Atlantic | Agile City by Inovia
- Remote work will continue to dominate in 2021 — but how will we be thinking about it? | FastCo
Events
We continued our Inovia Sessions online with 2 great events:
- Digitally Native Wealth, hosted by Alex
- Misconceptions on Starting and Scaling Marketplace Startups, hosted by Andre
Stay tuned as we prepare our 2021 lineup of roundtable events on topics that matter to you and your startup.