brad meikle
Canadian venture capital firm Cycle Capital Management plans to increase its presence in Ontario's clean technology market with a new office at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. The firm made the announcement at CIX Cleantech, hosted this week by the Canadian Innovation Exchange. Montréal-based Cycle also said that Partner Shirley Speakman, who joined the firm in March 2013, will head the office. Cycle has led or joined financings of a number of companies this year, including GaN Systems and Inocucor Technologies.
U.S.-based financial technology company Kabbage Inc has secured US$135 million in a Series E financing. The round was led by Reverence Capital Partners as well as ING, Santander InnoVentures and Scotiabank, one of Canada's top banks. Other new and existing investors in the deal included Thomvest Ventures, the US$250 million venture fund of Canada's Peter Thomson. Kabbage, which operates a financial services data and technology platform to provide fully automated funding to small businesses, said it has expanded its credit facility to over US$900 million. The Atlanta, Georgia-based company has raised US$240 million in funding to date.
Activity in Canada’s venture capital market continued to grow in the third quarter of 2015, according to a preliminary report by Thomson Reuters. Venture disbursements to Canadian companies totaled $664 million in this period, and are on pace to reach $2.4 billion by the end of December, which will make 2015 the best year for activity since 2002. In contrast, deal values in the domestic private equity market, which totaled $7.3 billion in Q3 2015, were in the first nine months 40 percent below levels recorded at the same time last year. Thomson Reuters said Canadian private equity investment in non-resident companies totaled over $129.6 billion at the end of September, which is well up from prior years.
The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) has announced this year's roster of 20 innovative companies to be inducted into the CIX Top 20 program. The companies were selected by a committee made up of technology experts and investors from across Canada and will appear at CIX 2015 in Toronto on November 17th. They are: Aislelabs, Beagle; Control, LeadSift, Miovision, PiinPoint, Plooto, Plum.io, Q4 Web Systems, Redtree Robotics, RtTech Software, Rubikloud Technologies, SilkStart Technology, SkySquirrel Technologies, Statflo, Synbiota, Thalmic Labs, ThinkData Works, Trulioo and Venzee.
Online retailer Cymax, a company that sells furniture in the United States and Canada, has raised US$25 million in its first funding round and could look to go public as early as next year, its CEO Arash Fasihi told Reuters. The financing of the Burnaby, British Columbia-based company was led by Frind Holdings, BDC Capital and Salman Partners.
Neil Petroff has been appointed to the role of vice chair of Northwater Capital Management, a Canadian private investment firm. Petroff is the former executive vice president of investments and CIO of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, a position he held between 2009 and 2015. Prior to Ontario Teachers, he worked at a number of financial institutions. Northwater, which has offices in Toronto and Chicago, is active in a number of markets, including venture capital. It has made several technology investments through its Northwater Intellectual Property Funds.
SoapBox, a Canadian enterprise software-as-a-service company, has secured US$3 million in seed-stage financing. The round was led by SBNY (formerly SoftBank Capital), Canadian venture firm Golden Venture Partners, and Accomplice (formerly Atlas Ventures). Founded in 2010, Toronto-based SoapBox has created a platform that helps connect business managers with the ideas of their employees, an activity that produces more engaged employees, improved performance, and stronger company culture. It said the investment's proceeds will be used to expand sales, marketing, and client success efforts to keep up with demand.
Toronto-based Figure 1, which operates a crowdsourced medical image library for the healthcare industry, announced it has raised an additional US$5 million in Series A funding, led by Union Square Ventures. The expanded round included existing backers Version One Ventures and Rho Canada Ventures, as well as Allen & Company. The funding brings Figure 1's Series A total to US$9 million. The company previously raised about $2 million (US$1.6 million) in seed funding in late 2013.
The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Desjardins Group and the National Bank of Canada have officially launched "Devenir entrepreneur,” a three-year awareness initiative that will promote entrepreneurship in Québec. The campaign, to be carried out on television, social media and a digital platform, will focus on encouraging young people to consider entrepreneurship as a career choice. The three institutional sponsors said they aim to see a larger local pool of entrepreneurs capable of starting up or taking over businesses.
U.S. private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group has agreed to acquire Syncsort Inc, a big data enterprise software provider based in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. No financial terms were disclosed. Clearlake said Syncsort's leadership position in the mainframe and big data segments make it an effective buy-and-build platform for undertaking consolidation in the software industry. The company, which was founded in 1968, is a portfolio investment of Canadian venture capital firm Georgian Partners. Its other investors include Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Goldman, Sachs & Co.