👉 Subscribe to our newsletter to receive Inovia Quarterly straight in your inbox. 📩
We hope you had a memorable and restful summer!
We welcomed SnapTravel to the Inovia portfolio. We’re biased but trust us, just give it a try for your next hotel booking and you’ll understand why we’re so excited about what Hussein and Henry are building.
In other Portfolio News, Vision Critical acquires Inovia portfolio company Pressly. The Boardlist recognizes top Canadian Women in tech — we are proud to have portfolio companies’ executives on the list! Tulip Retail raises a $40M Series B with KCPB. AppDirect and Thalmic Labs’ teams are expanding. Workfusion and Ross Intelligence share their take on the AI landscape.
Happy reading and thank you for being part of our story!
The Inovia Team
IN THE NEWS
- TheBoardlist released a list highlighting top Canadian Women in Tech. Congrats to Erin Young, CMO at Well.ca, Kristine Steuart, CEO at Allocadia and Magaly Charbonneau, Inovia LP and COO of PasswordBox | Betakit
- Jimoh Ovbiagele, ROSS’ CTO and co-founder, details why moving the engineering team back to Toronto was a no-brainer: “The best people in deep learning are here. Toronto is also the best place to access the global talent pool.” 🍁 | Toronto Life
- Max Yankelevich, Workfusion’s CEO, on how AI takes on the task of repetitive office work: “We are creating software robots who watch what you do and over time take on more and more of that work” 🤖 | Bloomberg
- CareGuide taps into Silicon Valley Bank as it eyes more acquisitions. CareGuide hit $5M in ARR, 600% growth YoY and shipped HeartPayroll to market 🚀 | Betakit
- Vision Critical acquires Pressly to build a solution to curate and share insights with both internal stakeholders and community members to nurture brand relationships. Congrats to the Pressly team! 👏 | Vision Critical
- Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath’s CTO and co-founder, leads the way with an open letter to ban killer robots alongside Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Dennis Hassabis and others. “Autonomous weapons systems […] have a very real potential to cause significant harm to innocent people along with global instability.” | Huffington Post
- Ron Pragides, VP Engineering at AppDirect, reflects on his first 28 days. Also, Michael DiFilippo joins as CFO | Medium and AppDirect
- Tulip Retail closes their Series B Round | PE Hub
- Thalmic CEO hints at what the startup is building: “making the interactions with the technology around us more seamless and immediate.” | CNBC
- Thalmic also welcomes Cheryl Eng, Apple veteran, as Retail Team Lead and Jari Niemela former Nokia and Microsoft VP as VP of Engineering | Medium and Betakit
- Mike Silagadze, Top Hat’s CEO, explains how his company is changing the way we learn in the classroom: “Instead of watching someone lead a class and read out loud for hours, let’s engage with the material.”| Techvibes
THOUGHTS
- Todd outlines Inovia’s core thesis in “The Centre Cannot Hold”. Will the shift towards decentralized systems redefine value creation? | Inovia Blog
- Hugues talks about reverting back to first principles and finding what works for *your* startup | Inovia Blog
- Sarah explains the thesis behind SnapTravel, our latest investment in conversational travel | Inovia Blog
- Sarah Marion shares insights about her work and community involvement | femBA
- Liat (Inovia’s summer intern) and Antoine share their key takeaways of the digital manufacturing space | Inovia Blog
- Hugues took some time over the summer to reflect on the top SaaS frameworks | Inovia Blog
- Ask an Investor Series: Sarah answers the question “When should I hire a VP of Finance?” | Betakit
INDUSTRY HEADLINES
- Pitchbook’s latest VC performance report is out. Pitchbook expects that net cash flows in the industry are likely to turn negative in 2017 for the first time since 2011 as capital invested has remained robust through the first nine months of 2017 amid a slower exit market | Pitchbook
- Canada Aims for Tech talent, emboldened by immigration worries in U.S. | WSJ
UPCOMING EVENTS
- Oct 1st-2nd: Shawn will be attending Top Hat’s Engage Conference in Chicago.
- Oct 2nd: Karam and Sarah will be attending TribalScale TakeOver in Toronto.
- Oct 2nd-5th: Alex will be attending the World Angel Investment Summit in Montréal.
- Oct 10th-11th: David and Alex will be at 2017 Canada FinTech Forum in Montréal.
- Oct 17th-18th: Busy week! Hugues will be attending the Alexa Accelerator Demo Day in Seattle. Todd will be at the C100 Growth Summit and Antoine will be at Rock Health Summit in San Francisco.
- Oct 17th-18th: David is speaking at the CIX Summit in Toronto.
- Oct 26th: Sarah will be attending CDL’s Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence Conference in Toronto.
- Nov 13th: Sarah will be on a panel at the InsurTech Expo in Toronto.
FUNDING
We’ve included all disclosed fundings of portfolio companies in Q3–2017 (excluding pre-seed investments). The lead gets a🏅.
SnapTravel: $8M from 🏅 Inovia Capital, Bee Partners, Lightbank LLC . Read more on the Inovia Blog
Tulip.io: US $40M from 🏅 KPCB, Jump Capital. Read more on the WSJ