Top 100 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2023

Mark Bania is the CEO at Contractor Compliance. Contractor Compliance is a cloud-based software that empowers organizations to easily collect, track and manage third-party contractor and vendor compliance.

After many months of development, we are beyond thrilled to announce the Top 100 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2023. Huge thank you note to all the founders and their teams who shared their story with our community. Massive congrats to these incredible teams as we know you are are bound to do incredible things in 2023 and beyond. Check out the full list here:

102. The Strategy Solution
101. Credx Academy
100. YourTable
99. Savant Recruitment
98. Tenure
97. Shomigo
96. Willenrimer
95. CreatorClub
94. Scale HR
93. Linkus Group
92. ThinkSmark
91. Canada Mentors
90. Look-see
89. Envol
88. Corl
87. Requity Homes
86. Cansulta
85. Brightly
84. Aggregate AI
83. NeuraVue
82. LittleYou
81. Devanow
80. Prelo
79. Total Mom Inc
78. Javelin
77. Litespace
76. Borealis Data
75. The Leadership Agency
74. Wilma
73. MoxyPatch
72. Blsh Delivery
71. Visto
70. Intribe
69. Deeded
68. Equivesto
67. Simply Eloped
66. myWellaBee
65. Payd
64. The Leansuite
63. Souqh
62. Hula
61. LabsCubed
60. Functionland
59. VanHack
58. Pilot
57. Realsage
56. Huex Labs
55. Agora
54. WorkTango
53. Truly Financial
52. MinuteBox
51. ContentBot
50. Blanka
49. WFHomie
48. Surex
47. SingleKey
46. Pathmatch
45. tilr
44. Sparrow
43. Local Logic
42. System-3
41. Pocketed
40. HiredHippo
39. Unwrapit
38. Part3
37. Forward AI
36. Wizeprep
35. Aterlo
34. Vetster
33. Contractor Compliance
32. Wingmate
31. Boast.ai
30. Biiibo
29. Testbox
28. Edgecom energy
27. Pathcore
26. Barley
25. Jeeves
24. Perch
23. Aleria
22. Rhenti
21. Shinydocs
20. Synctera
19. Adaptive Pulse
18. Agilicus
17. Goose Chase
16. Mappedin
15. 1Mentor
14. Flywheel
13. Railz
12. Crux OCM
11. ChocolateSoup
10. Kinderdrop
9. Ecopia AI
8. Scoop Solar
7. Uvaro
6. MedMe Health
5. Bidmii
4. Wagepoint
3. Klir
2. Badal
1. Index Exchange

102. The Strategy Solution

Founded: 2020
Founders: Paola Ruiz
Website: https://www.thestrategysolution.com/

Elevator Pitch: The SASI platform aims to modernize, transform, and revolutionize the way small businesses and startups plan and track their performance. By using proprietary strategy frameworks and performance metrics powered by AI, SASI offers a wide range of customizable templates and tools to guide businesses through the strategic planning process and set and track clear, actionable goals. The SASI platform also uses AI to analyze data and provide insights on how a business optimizes performance and achieves better results in its specific niche and industry. Whether businesses are just starting out or looking to take their business to the next level, the SASI platform is the perfect partner to help them succeed.

How it got started: I started my startup because the entire consulting process for owner-managed businesses is often approached in silos, and plans are not limited in execution due to a lack of budget or resource constraints. As a management consultant, I saw firsthand how the gap kept growing for my clients and how the processes of traditional enterprise consulting companies did not meet the needs of small businesses. I have always been passionate about helping small businesses transform and succeed. I have spent years developing my own methodology working with clients to develop and implement strategic plans that drive growth. But as the business landscape has evolved, I realized that only enterprises could access these tools or that the market is fragmented by other practitioners seeing businesses only from their financial lens and I knew there was a need for a more modern, efficient approach to strategic planning and consulting tailored for the needs of startups and small business at the price point that did not compromise quality.

Growth to date: Currently beta testing for lenders and fintech firms.

What’s next: We plan to expand our target market and introduce new features as the development progresses. Before the end of the second quarter of 2023, we plan to launch an IOS and android app that has a gamification component to engage teams. But our focus remains on achieving PMF and retaining and upselling to our existing customer base.

Ask from the community:
a) I’m looking for a technical co-founder or a dev house for my venture. I’m looking for someone with the technical skills and experience to develop and launch technology platforms with AI capabilities or at least someone who can consult on this area as development progresses. b) Would love to connect with more beta users i.e small businesses or startups to be part of our beta group in industries outside of fintech and c) want to do more networking and introductions for fundraising purposes.

101. Credx Academy 

Founded: 2020
Founders: Masih Mehdizadeh
Website: https://credx.academy

Elevator Pitch: Hands-on learning through development of real-world projects accompanied by mentorship and peer support, is what sets the Developer Club experience apart from any coding bootcamp! Whether you’re looking to level up as a developer or just starting to code, you can find your club and grow as a developer!

How it got started: Credx Academy was inspired by and spun out of our agency’s internship program (D&C Innovation). Our core values centered around critical thinking, problem-solving, and learning to learn helped our interns learn and grow much more rapidly as software developers and become ready for the job market exponentially faster than the usual route. That inspired us to turn our process into a club, the Developer Club, where the internship experience is simulated through pre-recorded development sessions mentorship, personal development sessions, and peer support. We have multiple paths you can choose for the Developer Club according to the area of expertise you’re focusing on like backend or frontend development or machine learning. We are now launching a special Developer Club called the Career Growth Developer Club that’s designed for developers looking to grow their career, find out what skills they’re missing to land higher paying jobs, and get access to mentorship.

Growth to date: We have a growing community of 500+ developers, software engineers, and makers looking to connect and build.

What’s next: We have a special launch offer as we are roll out our new content for the pre-recorded development sessions.  You can get access to mentors and the Developer Club FREE for 3 months if you register now with the Promo Code: “FOUNDERS2023”! Click here.

100. YourTable

Founded: 2018
Founders: Peter Chien and Yvonne Ru
Website: https://www.yourtable.co/

Elevator Pitch: We are solving the problem of loneliness and depression that are often linked to those who frequently eat alone. YourTable app focuses on building professional relationships and friendships through eating & business networking, the Linkedin for food. We want to help prevent loneliness, depression, and contribute to overall happiness and work productivity.

How it got started: It was a personal problem for Peter after graduating from UofT and working for a few years. He often ate alone because he was so busy with work, family obligations, and life in general. This caused him to be depressed, and work productivity dropped. He realized he can’t be the only one with this problem, and found out as much as 67% of Canadians eat alone. Believing that prevention is the best cure, YourTable was co-founded with Yvonne to deliver happiness, one table at a time.

Growth to date: We are incubated at UofT Entrepreneurship ICUBE and Sheridan Entrepreneurship EDGE, winner of UofT x Lo Family Social Venture Fund $30k Grant. During the height of the pandemic last year, we started a Give-Back Initiative. Formed in partnership with Tim Hortons Canada, we wanted to give back to our front-line heroes at hospitals. Thanks to their generosity, they provided complimentary meals while we did the deliveries. We have delivered over 2000+ free meals to 7 hospitals. We are a community of 500+ food lovers. Join us on our app today!

What’s next: We will be introducing new features to our app, random introductions to those who match your networking topics, as well as group chats based on business industries!

Ask from the community: We are looking to raise our first round of funding and would love to connect with investors. Additionally, we would love to connect with restaurant partners who would like to be promoted for free on our app!

99. Savant Recruitment

Founded: 2022
Founder: Jessica Smith
Website: https://savantrecruitment.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Our vision is to revolutionize the recruiting industry by leveraging cutting-edge technology like AI and automation to streamline processes and deliver massive results for our clients. By using these advanced tools, we are able to match top talent with industry-leading companies up to 30-50% faster than our competitors. This innovative approach has not only led to success for our clients, but also caught the attention of investors who see the potential for growth and disruption in the traditional recruiting landscape. I am committed to leading Savant Recruitment as the next-gen recruiting firm. Savant Recruitment operates all across North America and can facilitate finding you contract talent without you having to lift a finger or worry about the back-end. We will take care of Payroll, Insurances, and Benefits for you.

How it got started: In December 2021, Jessica Smith decided to leave corporate Talent Acquisition and knew that there was a better and more robust way to recruit, than what she was implementing with the budgets she had to work with in Talent Acquisition. She left corporate to start Savant Recruitment and has been venturing into new industries outside of her niche Tech. Jessica is going back to her roots and working in the Manufacturing, Construction, and various other industries.

Growth to date: 1st year was profitable.

What’s next: As I continue to scale the business with new clients, I would like to make some important hires in this business. Hires that are going to help me deliver even faster and continuing to give unparalleled experiences to clients and candidates. Our goal is to be the leading recruiting agency in North America, due to early adoption of new technology, and great service!

Ask from the community: We are looking to connect with other founders in the space that are looking to take their recruiting efforts another notch. We are implementing a very robust plan where we can help you market and get your company to the next level as a trusted partner. We have some exciting and exclusive partnerships we will be announcing on our end, that clients will be able to take advantage of in a package with Savant Recruitment.

98. Tenure

Founded: 2023
Website: https://tenurefi.com/

Elevator Pitch: We are helping employers provide a new style of rewards and benefits program to attract and retain top talent.

How it got started: It came out of need by some small business owners looking to provide an incentive program when group RRSPs were out of reach. They wanted something that could help attract new hires and keep their incredible staff.

Growth to date: 6 pilot customers confirmed before the platform is complete, with more signing up each week.

What’s next: Getting 10-20 businesses for our pilot to launch with, and begin to gather data to learn how we can provide even more value to our clients and their employees.

Ask from the community: We are looking for more companies for our paid pilot and to join our waitlist, so go sign-up and book a meeting to learn more.

97. Shomigo

Founded: 2020
Founder: Alykhan Kara
Website: https://shomigo.com/

Elevator Pitch: Shomigo is a Toronto-based start-up that leverages machine learning to facilitate local shopping. It provides users with personalized recommendations for items based on their previous purchases and interests while incorporating social features. Shomigo seamlessly integrates with any Shopify store and provides thorough analytics to its vendor partners.

How it got started: Shomigo began as a way to enable people to shop locally more easily. Their focus on using machine learning to recommend items to people is how they hope to make it as easy as possible.

Growth to date: Growing team of 10 people working 80+ local brands.

What’s next: Shomigo hopes to add in new features to improve the eCommerce experience, while expanding to include more local stores across Canada.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to grow our userbase and connect with more local stores.path

96. Willenrimer

Founded: 2021
Founders: Matt Millen, Csilla Brimer
Website: https://willenrimer.com/

Elevator Pitch: Empowering blockchain entrepreneurs with blueprints for building disruptive, sustainable companies that respect individual freedom and create positive social impact.

How it got started: The story of Willenrimer begins well before the official business ever existed, in fact, you have to go all the way back to 2017! This is when Matt & Csill both entered the cryptocurrency scene, first as community builders in their local areas and then as independent consultants serving these same communities. After years of repeatedly crossing paths Matt & Csill realized their combined expertise & knowledge was bar-none, so they decided to team up and Willenrimer was born!

Growth to date: Originally Willenrimer served many smaller startups who were pre-funding or pre-mvp. As time went on and the crypto markets contracted, our current client demographic changed. Today we serve larger, more established companies with complex projects.

What’s next: Strengthening our international presence and increasing brand awareness with more established, well-funded companies. Additionally, widening our investor network to better serve our startup clients.

Ask from the community: Please connect us with any projects who are interested in transitioning some part of their existing business model from web2 to Web3 and if you’re an investor supporting Web3 please reach out – we work with lots of great companies and many of them are/will be raising funds.

95. CreatorClub

Founded: 2022
Founders: Anthony Chiaravalloti CEO, Mark Simone CRO, Chris Cundari COO, Daniel Francavilla CMO
Website: https://www.creatorclubstudios.com/

Elevator Pitch: CreatorClub is a marketplace connecting brands with a curated, trained group of creators to produce content at scale and keep up with how brands are built today.

How it got started: King Street Media, a creative performance agency based in Toronto, saw the need for a more streamlined content creation process and a way to engage talent and brands. Today, social media calls for a consistent stream of content, and there has been a historic shift in the value of attention, which the agency identified — yet it is challenging for brands to implement this at scale. The agency partnered with VC and award-winning entrepreneur Anthony Lacavera and his firm Globalive to help develop and expand CreatorClub, a new startup to fill this need of being relevant and active online — building brands through content, not solely through product.

Growth to date:
Launch of first location in Toronto
Partnered with Globalive
Current clients are from the industries of online healthcare, insurance, financial planning, social impact and venture capital
CreatorClub has partnered with Toronto-based thought leaders, scaling brands and even other agencies

What’s next:
Growing the roster of creators
Building out our next Toronto location mid-2023
Future expansion to additional cities

Ask from the community:
Creators can apply to join the roster at https://creatorclubstudios.com/creators
Follow on social to find out about upcoming community events and programming for creators and businesses
@creatorclubstudios on Instagram. We’re hiring. Visit our LinkedIn for roles, or see roster openings at creatorclubstudios.com.

94. ScaleHR

Founded: 2020
Founders: Jeff Waldman
Website: https://goscalehr.com/

Elevator Pitch: ScaleHR helps growing SMBs build and implement effective HR and tech solutions at scale.

How it got started: Born out of the pandemic in early 2020, which saw growing SMB tech companies shift their business model and how they structured their organizations from a people perspective. ScaleHR’s first client was a growing fintech company where the focus was on helping them launch in Canada and rethink their HR tech stack to support their changing business and HR operations.

Growth to date: 100% growth year-over-year since it was founded. Primary markets include Canada and the United States, and secondary markets in Western Europe and Australia.

What’s next: launching a revamped business and services model in Q1 2023. This new model will provide better support to growing SMBs throughout their journeys from start-up to post-Series A.

Ask from the community: 
Looking to meet new prospects
Generate feedback on ScaleHR’s new tiered business model

93. Linkus Group 

Founded: 2010
Key people: Adam Gellert and Abby Goldstein
Website: http://www.linkusgroup.com/

Elevator Pitch: Linkus Group is a highly personalized recruitment agency working with busy Founders, HR and Hiring Managers across North America on hires they want to get right. Over the last decade, we’ve made it our mission to help our clients make the best key hires and maximize their internal time and productivity. We typically only accept referrals and work with a select few companies from the early stage and as they grow. We prioritize Senior to Executive roles and partner up with companies ranging from 1-100 employees, from bootstrapped and seed to Series B (and beyond). Our one KPI is repeat business.

How it got started: Linkus Group was founded by Adam Gellert in 2012. After many years in the industry, Adam wanted to change the archaic ways of recruitment. We are a team of experienced, dedicated and honest professionals who really care about making an impact on people and on businesses all around Canada and the world.

Growth to date: We are a small team and, although we want to remain a boutique firm, we are continually growing. We are constantly looking to hire internally, while also focusing on growing our business and our candidate network. We always accept referrals to high-potential candidates and growing companies who want to make hiring a priority. Our business has recently hit new heights with our current team and are seeing a ton of success in the recruitment industry.

What’s next: We are ready to branch out into new and unexplored markets. A lot of companies are moving to Toronto’s hot tech industry to build their business and we want to help. We not only have a team that specializes in technology, but have been and will continue to make an impact for companies who want to hire like the best, are under 100 people in Tech, Services, Manufacturing, Hospitality, Apparel and more.

Ask from the community: We are connected with Founders and hiring managers who either want to improve the way they hire, need help with hard to fill roles or are looking to drive results with their human capital. We are accepting referrals to anyone or any company who is hiring now or in the future and will provide a consultation to see if there’s a fit for us to help. We are also looking to connect with top talent who may be open to a new position or who just want to hear about potential opportunities.

92. ThinkSmark

Founded: 2019
Founder: Amber C Payden
Website: https://www.thinksmark.com/

Elevator Pitch: SMARK is a global marketplace and resource hub for all things small business, offering products and services that best fit the continual needs for businesses and entrepreneurs.

How it got started: There are so many places for entrepreneurs and businesses to get information around growing their business, but rarely do you see the products, services and tech tools centralized and simplified in a way that people can learn and retain information that is applicable for their business now. SMARK was created to give entrepreneurs/biz owners and people that support business owners one platform to get the information they need to educate themselves around business areas, connect with products, services and other business owners, get involved locally and ultimately grow and sustain their business year over year.

What’s next: We are currently building out our new website/mobile application, and looking for partners that would like to get involved with the marketplace by creating a storefront and connecting with local events across the US/Europe Markets. For the Small Business Owner, we have a publication rolling out called 7 SMARK questions, which allows for you to get featured in the marketplace and printed collateral.

Ask from the community: We are always recruiting for consultants that would like to get certified in SMARK University which is our EdTech component of the marketplace. You can get involved by sending an email to intheknow@thinksmark.com or heading to our website at www.thinksmark.com

91. Canada Mentors

Founded: 2020
Founders: Deep Singh, Vidhi Gulati
Website: https://canadamentors.com/

Elevator Pitch: Canada Mentors is a leading tech recruitment firm that helps North American Tech companies build diverse tech teams by hiring highly skilled Senior Software Engineers and above. We mentor and connect Software Engineers from across the globe (based within Canada or abroad) with people-focused and purpose-driven companies. Our proprietary technology and over a decade of experience in building high-performing teams enables us to find, screen, and match strong-fit candidates in days. Some of our humble clients include Seed + Series A Tech startups, fast-growing scaleups (Series B to D funded), and well-known mature tech organizations.

How it got started: Canada Mentors was born out of Deep’s & Vidhi’s journey of immigrating to Canada and navigating the Canadian tech landscape to find their first relevant job. What started as a mentorship program for experienced newcomers in tech, was re-purposed to a people-first recruitment firm when our clients struggled to find highly skilled Software Engineering tech talent.

Growth to date: Helped 100+ tech companies hire 250+ Software Engineers with a 95%+ retention rate!

What’s next: Make it easy and cost-efficient for the next wave of growing tech companies in North America to hire global tech talent

Ask from the community: If you are struggling to hire the right fit Software Engineers, we would love to connect!

90. Look-see

Founded: 2020
Founder: Brandon Kindred
Website: https://www.look-see.com

Elevator Pitch: Are you tired of spending days to weeks manually searching for UX issues on your website? Look-see is here to help with our automated UX audits. We do the UX audits so you can stay focused on delivering delightful experiences to your users.

How it got started: After working with over a dozen different software products, our founder noticed that there was a HUGE problem. Despite the amount of time and effort each team spent thinking about the user, websites and online software still had terrible user experiences. Whether it’s content that’s filled with spelling and grammar mistakes, inconsistent interactions, or just being downright inaccessible. But why was this a problem? As our founder set out to answer this question, he discovered that companies lacked the tools necessary to have real insight into user experiences, let alone being able to track the quality of user experiences over time. The few companies that were optimizing their UX needed millions of users to test various changes on. There must be a better way! After months of interviews with over a hundred UX experts, our founder distilled their needs into a tool that helps UX experts find user experience issues and communicate the value of various improvements with stakeholders in product, marketing, engineering, and even leadership through reports tailored to the recipient.

Growth to date: We raised $50k to fund market research and the development of a beta SaaS application. We recently launched an MVP and we are now accepting new users.

What’s next: In a word…sales. We are currently looking for our first paying customers and refining our existing features to provide even more value to our users. To accomplish this, we are raising a pre-seed round of $500k

Ask from the community: I’m looking to raise a pre-seed round of $500k on a SAFE note. If you are an investor or know one who is, please email me at bkindred@look-see.com. You can view our current deck at https://docsend.com/view/p9ig9avj69rvksgz

89. Envol

Founded: 2016
Founders: Brianna Blaney, CEO & Founder
Website: www.envolstrategies.com

Elevator pitch: Make your business human. At the intersection of marketing and HR, Envol is a fractional people solutions firm specializing in employer branding, recruiting, DEI, and human resources.

How it got started: The traditional recruitment agency model provides band-aid solutions, outdated value propositions, and limited ROI. We knew there had to be a better way. That’s when Envol, a boutique talent acquisition and employee experience firm, was born. We democratize your access to people solutions, helping you leverage business intelligence and build muscle internally to drive your growth.

Growth to date: Driven by referrals and word-of-mouth, Envol has grown more than 500% in the past 2 years, scaling to help hundreds of companies across Canada find and keep the right people. We’re proud to work alongside impactful organizations to drive industry-wide change in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whether you’re a large organization like University of British Columbia or a start-up just getting off the ground, our solutions were built to scale!

What’s next: We remain relentlessly committed to adding value to your business. This includes accessing grant funding to help you hire top talent, train your people, drive business growth, and more. As we continue to scale across Canada, we look forward to expanding our partner network.

Ask from the community: Running a business is hard. From hiring and onboarding new employees, to nurturing employee development and fostering an engaging workplace culture – all while driving business growth. It’s overwhelming. We’re here to help! Book your FREE consultation with our team of HR specialists today.

88. Corl 

Founded: 2016
Founder: Derek Manuge
Key people: Mike Magnacca
Website: https://corl.io/

Elevator Pitch: Corl provides non-dilutive growth capital to tech companies.

How it got started: Unsatisfied with existing venture debt options, Corl created a way for founders to easily access growth capital with founder-friendly terms.

Growth to date: Corl’s platform has financed growth for over 60 businesses and facilitated over $35M in investments. They are now writing cheques up to $2M USD.

What’s next: Corl is on the lookout for more great tech companies to finance!

Ask from the community: Corl’s team is growing! They’re on the lookout for credit analysts, operations, and finance roles.

87. Requity Homes

Founded: 2020
Founder: Amy Ding
Website: https://www.requityhomes.com/

Elevator Pitch: Requity Homes is creating an alternative path to homeownership through a modernized rent-to-own program. We help qualified renters purchase the home of their choice upfront so that they can rent the home from us with the option to buy back the home at a guaranteed price down the line.

How it got started: Home ownership is something that’s close to my heart. I still remember having to move 7 times during my first two years in Canada. That experience just reinforced how important home ownership really is. Owning a home is so much more than just having a roof over your head. It’s a place to call your own, to raise a family, and to build wealth. Yet, too many families find themselves on the outside looking in, feeling stuck renting. Rising home prices, stagnating wages, and tightening mortgage requirements have left many unable to achieve their home ownership dreams. About three years ago I saw the opportunity in Canada to help families who could afford the cost of a mortgage, but for whatever reason found themselves unable to get one. That’s when I decided to quit my corporate job and started Requity Homes.

Growth to date: We’ve seen applications to our program more than double in 2022 and have helped numerous families get on the path to home ownership sooner.

What’s next: We’re continuing to expand to the Prairies region

Ask from the community: Always looking to talk to any real estate investors looking for opportunities to help more families get into homeownership

86. Cansulta

Founded: 2021
Founder: Alexandra Kapelos-Peters
Website: https://www.cansulta.com/

Elevator Pitch: Cansulta is a global collaboration platform & community that provides businesses with easy & affordable access to vetted professionals. We’re the digital bridge between enterprises and world-class consultants: consulting for the modern era. Better business awaits!

How it got started: In fall of 2020, small-business owner and co-founder Alex was audited. She needed clarity on some very specific cross-border tax rules. Lacking this specialized knowledge, she wasted hours reviewing 14M+ search results on Google, all offering conflicting advice. Then, she went to LinkedIn and called trusted friends-of-friends within her network… still without clarity. Finally, she was referred to someone who had handled the exact situation for 20+ years. What a relief! Just a few minutes with an expert had saved hours, headaches, and expense. If only we could all access reliable help from experienced and trusted business experts, all the time!

Growth to date: Cansulta now offers the diverse expertise of MORE THAN 100 vetted professionals in every business area, for every industry and need. Our growing partner network and community provides discounts and collaboration with other trusted providers and specialists, such as web development, CRM, legal, payments, cost reduction, and grants/funding.

What’s next: Even more professionals, features & solutions are on their way in 2023!
Associates (junior consultants) are now available to complement internal teams or work alongside senior consultants
More workshops, webinars & drop-in sessions with industry experts
More ready-to-go, standardized Cansulta Solutions for common challenges
New, flexible subscription and prepaid options let you collaborate as needed, from a short live consultation to large multi-month, multi-team projects

Ask from the community:
1) Become a VIP member for exclusive perks and discounts and to join our growing global online business network. Code FoundersTech23 gets you 50% off, with 1st month free!
2) Talk to our Concierge team to match you with the perfect help for your unique needs.
3) Tell your savvy business contacts about Cansulta—they’ll thank you!

85. Brightly

Founded : 2021
Founder: Sarah Brekelmans
Website: https://brightlysearch.com/

Elevator Pitch: Brightly is an executive search & recruitment platform founded on the belief that mindful, nurtured candidate relationships and assessments make for stronger long-term hires. The connections we make possible for our clients aren’t luck — they’re based on a deep understanding of people’s needs, and a compassionate, honest understanding of both the candidate and the company. We identify the candidates who can lead and support their teams towards greater collaboration, performance and resilience. Our results speak for themselves, with a 100% success rate on search mandates and 90% of our clients partnering with Brightly on a repeat basis. How it got started: We recognized that growing startups needed a recruitment partner that could deliver more than just qualified resumes – they also needed a partner who could work more intimately with them and help navigate a hire from ideation of the actual role – straight to a signed offer. Brightly works closely with a set number of clients to articulate hiring needs into a cohesive job description, market their brand effectively to the right talent through content material and tools – and evaluate + secure candidates equipped with the skillsets their business needs for the long term.

Growth to date: Over the past year we’ve expanded our services to the US, now partnering with a number of VC and PE backed startups to help companies within their portfolios build out their marketing and HR teams.

What’s next: We will be continuing to expand our executive search and recruitment services to startups in both the US and Canada. We will also soon be beta-testing a new service offering in the coaching space that will focus on helping companies mentor and grow their up and coming people managers.

Ask from the community: We are interested in connecting with growing startups who are looking for counsel and/or support on hiring mandates, as well as startups who might be curious about coaching services that can help support new people managers.

84. Aggregate AI 

Founded: 2019
Founders: Amir Feizpour and Maryam Farooq
Website: https://ai.science

Elevator Pitch: Smart Knowledge Navigator helping developers find answers to detailed technical questions buried inside exponentially growing amount of technical documents (demo: https://youtu.be/ME2tta-Qtek)

How it got started: https://youtu.be/9eosz33kV-I (can we use a video?)

Growth to date: we have built a large global community of AI practitioners and researchers – we are currently working towards our first commercial release in early 2023

What’s next: We are part of creative destruction lab’s AI systems cohort, and currently working with mentors from successful tech startups to launch our commercial offering and also raising our seed round

Ask from the community: at the moment we are taking angel cheques on a rolling basis – so any introduction to indivudal angels (US or Canada) would be appreciated.

83. NeuraVue

Founded:  2022
Founder: Afshan Ahmad
Website: https://www.neuravue.com

Elevator Pitch: Currently available surveillance solutions in the market are highly motion sensitive and send alerts for motion detection. Stats show that over 99% of these notifications do not require attention. Hence comes NeuraVue! NeuraVue is an amber alert for emergency events! It’s a platform backed by AI and ML model analyzes camera feeds on real-time basis and sends alerts for emergency events for appropriate action like:Signal for help detection
Physical Abuse detection
Fall detection
Weapon detection
Zone violation

Our competitive edge is:
Smart camera agnostic solution (it will work with your existing smart camera)
Less privacy and security concerns (the camera feed is viewed and analyzed by the AI model with no human access. Thus, addressing privacy and security concerns)
One stop comprehensive emergency events detection solution

How it got started: We had cameras at my loved one’s place which gave me the false sense of security that I will get them help when needed. But like any currently available surveillance solution, the number of 99% of the alerts were false positives and did not require our attention. That’s why when my loved one needed help, I only got to the alert when it was too late. I therefore wanted to use AI to solve this problem and get people help where needed, when needed.

Growth to date: NeuraVue has had following accomplishments to date:
Developed a working prototype for NeuraVue product
Got government grants to support the solution
Identified leads for customer validation of the solution
Got featured as top 20 companies at Collision Conference (World’s largest Tech Web summit)

What’s next: NeuraVue is offering free customer validation on your existing smart camera solution for one month (no strings attached)! Let’s get in on the promotional campaign and be our VIP customer by trying out our solution free of cost! Trust me, you won’t regret it! All VIP customers who got into the customer validation program and tried our solution at freemium will get discounted pricing for one year. Furthermore, all freemium customers will get into raffle for 5 NeuraVue NFT prizes!
Once validated, NeuraVue will move to commercial launch this year! Stay tuned.

Ask from the community: Let’s be the change! Sign up here to try NeuraVue for free and be the part of raffle to win 5 NeuraVue’s NFTs!

82. LittleYou 

Founded: 2020
Founder: Christina Guo
Website: https://www.littleyou.ca/

Elevator pitch: Little You provide a free online application for kids to design 3D avatars, which they can customize every aspect of their characters by change color, size and select outfits from our database. We will then bring the 3D model to life with 3D printing.

How it got started: Idealized and developed by Christina Guo as a unique option for kids to boost their eagerness to explore and create something exclusive, offering a customizable experience, with the development and design of their avatar, from modeling and coloring to physically accessorize the characters. The idea came up while she was studying at OCAD University. As an artist and a believer of the importance of creativity and seeing the world through the eyes of a child, the founder of Little You strives to provide countless opportunities for children to acquire social skills while bringing families closer together.

Growth to date: Since we launched in February 2021, our website has been experiencing a growing number of unique visitors daily. We have more than 300 playing customers with over 20,000 unique visitors upon launch. We are currently in discussion with 35 schools and have secured 3 businesses partnership up to date.

What’s next: We are looking to add more strategic partners in the upcoming months. Special promotion and limited edition will be introduced in the New Year.

Ask from the community: We are looking to connect with partners in the educational space and start fundraising in the New Year to expand our team.

81. Devanow

Founded: 2021
Founder: Konstantin Melkov
Website: http://devanow.com

Elevator Pitch: Devanow provides subscription bookkeeping for Canadian and US small businesses and start ups. At a predicable monthly rate we organize your workflow, run your payroll, manage your accounts payable and receivable. In return, you get reliable data for your decision making and more time on hands to focus on what you do best.

How it got started: It started with first few clients who reached out looking for bookkeeping support.

Growth to date: We doubled our client base in 2022.

What’s next: Pivot from growing through referrals to cold sales. Launching our MVP in Q4 2023.

Ask from the community: Looking to connect with small business owners and start up founders who are looking for help in their day-to-day bookkeeping operations.

80. Prelo

Founded: 2021
Founders: Olu Adedeji
Website: http://prelo.io

Elevator Pitch: We make it easy for agencies that want to collaborate with Startups to find and connect with decision makers ONLY from well-funded Startup.

How it got started: We tried to build a tech startup to “disrupt” the recruitment industry in 2018 and we failed. We failed slowly, we failed over 3yrs and it hurt. We didn’t fail because of our tech(AI), in fact our tech was great, but our marketing sucked. We delegated marketing to “experts”, we basically allowed other people to tell our story while we paid them a lot of money for the pleasure. All the while, we were building a “data tool” to solve our problem and sharing our insights with our founder friends who were building SaaS tools. We received so much positive feedback from founders  that we had to close the curtain on “disrupting the recruitment “. We got to work in May 2021 and focused on building “Growth Data” as it was originally called. Within 2 weeks into the build, I decided that Growth Data sounded too geeky, so I renamed it “Prelo” a week before launch fromBrazilian jiu-jitsu.

Growth to date: Idea to revenue in 11 weeks with 400+ users

Ask from the community: looking to connect with North American based
– Video software companies
– Neo Banks serving SMBs
– Digital Agency networks
– Newsletter Owners with an agency and creative audience

79. Total Mom Inc

Founded: 2017
Founder: Anna Sinclair
Website: https://www.totalmom.ca & https://www.totalmompitch.ca

Elevator Pitch: Total Mom Inc is a 100% women-owned company on a mission to transform women’s personal and professional lives by offering an educational community platform that helps women successfully start and grow their businesses while juggling motherhood. Total Mom is the fastest-growing professional community of mom entrepreneurs, serving over 20,000 moms and growing through its award-winning programs in partnership with North America’s largest brands.

How it started: In 2017, Anna Sinclair became a mother and noticed a gap in what was offered to moms interested in growing a family and their careers. After losing multiple opportunities to advance in her career as a new mom, she made it her mission to build programs and events that helped women do both while being supported. Shortly after launching Canada’s largest holistic festival for moms, “The Total Mom Show,”, Anna pivoted the company online. She grew a massive network of women founders, helping women start and grow successful businesses and brands. Anna is now an award-winning entrepreneur, CEO, and early-stage investor dedicated to helping women build a life and business that aligns with their dreams.

Growth to date: Total Mom has grown by thousands of members over the last two years and has doubled its revenue year after year. The company first launched as an events company and pivoted online during the pandemic. The community grew like wildfire across the nation following the virtual relaunch of The Total Mom Pitch small business search in hopes of reaching Canadian moms coast to coast. Following the success of that program, the company began working with some of North America’s most prominent brands through various marketing and advertising campaigns. It became an extension of many large brands’ marketing efforts, helping them connect with thousands of entrepreneurs coast to coast.

Total Mom is best known for becoming Canada’s fastest-growing professional network of mom entrepreneurs. The company hosts an award-winning national initiative and small business search called Canada’s Total Mom Pitch. The program is known for featuring the top c-suite women executives in the country, earned media of the best kind and recognition awards that give women national media coverage. The program brings forward brands like Bell, VistaPrint, ScotiaBank, Visa, UPS, Google, EDC, GoDaddy, WXN, Omers Ventures, OWNR, Huumans, and +more.

What’s next: Total Mom will soon release proprietary research and a report in partnership with WEHK, introducing the first-of-its-kind “ state of entrepreneurship among Canadian Moms’ and will be launching scholarship programs with partners such as Bell and Vistaprint. Total Mom is also producing an industry gala on May 30th, 2023, with award-winning experiential marketing and events company The Concierge Club. The Canadian Women Entrepreneur Industry Gala (CWE Gala) will bring Canada’s Top executives, brands, agencies, influencers, creators and media to take action, network, create and celebrate the advancement of women through programs, campaigns and CSR initiatives. Total Mom’s ed tech app launches September 2023- bringing together experts and brands we love in one place and helping moms start and grow a business inside a professional community app.

The platform will empower members to access transformational programs personally & professionally through group coaching, masterclasses and community experiences. Our mission is to positively impact millions of women through a global hub that helps them start and grow a successful business.

Ask from the community: Please help Total Mom find the CMO of our dreams! If you are a company serving small business owners looking to tap into national opportunities to get in front of thousands of small business owners, take your impact to the next level. Work with Total Mom through our festivals, small business programs and initiatives, industry gala and Entrepreneurship school. Your partnership helps us develop and grow more programs, scholarships, grants and education for moms growing a business and family in Canada and the US. Reach out to info at totalmom.ca.

78. Javelin

Founded: 2021
Founders: Justin Ford and Coleman Chan
Website: https://www.javelinsportsinc.com

Elevator Pitch: Javelin is a mobile app that helps people play volleyball.

How it got started: Growing up, Justin and Coleman were both passionate sports players. Unfortunately, they found that after they left high school, they weren’t playing as much as they did when they were kids. After meeting in University, Justin and Coleman decided they wanted to work together to help make it easier to play sports. They picked volleyball because it was one of the sports they had the most trouble playing and thought it could use a dedicated platform.

Growth to date: Javelin Sports saw 55% MoM growth during 2022 by helping players get out and start playing volleyball again after the pandemic.

What’s next: Javelin Sports has built an active and passionate community of volleyball players. They are currently focused on providing more ways for their players to play.

Ask from the community: We’d love to play volleyball with you! Be sure to check us out by searching Javelin on the app store or play store.

77. Litespace

Founded: 2021
Founder: Muhammad Jaffar (CPO)
Website: https://litespace.io/

Elevator Pitch: Litespace is a SaaS startup that provides modern workplace management tools for remote and hybrid companies. Our mission is to create more engaging work environments and build great cultures. Our key offerings include smart work scheduling, event planning and recommendations, increasing employee productivity and morale, and helping companies manage their office spaces more economically.

How it got started: During the last year we started to see how deeply the pandemic has impacted people at work and organizations. Employee engagement and connectedness had significantly dropped during periods of remote working and building workplace culture had become an even greater challenge. Today, while the hybrid approach tries to address some of these challenges, it introduces more problems around scheduling and communication within teams on when and where they are working from. We decided to solve these challenges by streamlining office scheduling and bringing people back into offices more organically through our recommenders. Our app makes going to the office more purposeful, intentional and productive, all the while helping employees build stronger connections.

Growth to date: Made a business pivot in August this year and we have 500+ employees on our waiting list signed up for the new product.

What’s next: Launching our new platform in Jan 2023 to help companies solve their engagement issues.

Ask from the community: connect with users, mentors and potential channel partnership!

76. Borealis Data

Founded: 2020 – that’s right, another pandemic timing startup!
Founders: Joel Andrews, Kasey Bayne
Website: https://www.borealis-data.com/
Heroku add-on listing: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/borealis-pg

Elevator Pitch: We believe that every app deserves the highest grade security, whether it’s a personal blog, an online store or a government financial aid portal. Best practices are clear that an app’s backend services should always expose the smallest footprint possible to prevent breaches of sensitive data; in other words, only the app itself should be able to talk to your database and other services directly. Never gamble with users’ data. That’s why our Heroku add-ons lock each data integration away in its own virtual private cloud while providing simple tools to seamlessly open a secure tunnel to the data service.

How it got started: At my last job I noticed early on that the Heroku Postgres database add-on we were using exposes the database server to the entire public internet, which is a serious breach of security best practices. In fact, all first and third party database add-ons on Heroku that I’m aware of have the same issue. As a Heroku user, you can purchase an Enterprise Agreement to get access to Private Spaces, which allow you to provision your Heroku app and a select few add-ons (notably only first party add-ons offered by Heroku itself, though) within a virtual private cloud so your backend resources (database, cache) are not exposed to the public internet. However, a Heroku Enterprise Agreement can be quite expensive and subscribing to it cuts off access to some of the less expensive application server types.

When the pandemic hit, like many, I re-evaluated my priorities and where I was spending my time, and decided it was time to branch out on my own and try to fix the problem I saw with database add-ons on Heroku at a lower price and with greater flexibility than a Heroku Enterprise license agreement.
Joel Andrews, Founder, Borealis Data

Growth to date:
Over 700 installations
Over 130 users
Out of beta in November 2022, with paying customers already!
Launched initially for North American users, expanded to Europe in early 2022

What’s next: We’re ready to bring security to even more developers and entrepreneurs worldwide. Beyond Heroku to allow even more developers to access Borealis wherever they build their apps.

Ask from the community: If you’re a developer or entrepreneur interested in security, let’s talk! We want to get the word out about why secure databases are so important! We’re able to do talks on security, app development, startup marketing, and bringing your app idea to life (and all that entails!).

75. The Leadership Agency

Founded: 2017
Founder: Jamie Savage
Website: https://www.leadershipagency.com/

Elevator Pitch: The Leadership Agency is North America’s recruitment partner of choice for the fastest-growing startups. With a mission to help build the most impressive companies of our generation, The Leadership Agency helps startups find and hire best-in-class talent. As industry disruptors with over 15 years of experience and award-winning services, The Leadership Agency has truly become the one-stop-shop for startup recruitment. Working exclusively with startups, The Leadership Agency reaches all lines of business, including C-level, sales, leadership, tech, finance, marketing, and more.

How it got started: Founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Jamie Savage came from the corporate world and founded The Leadership Agency in 2017 with a dual mission – to help build the most impressive companies of our generation by helping them make their best leadership hires AND to build her company to be better than any company she’s ever worked for.

Growth to date:
Expanded global footprint to the US in 2018 and the UK and AUS market in 2021
200% increase in productivity
Grown and advanced our team
Made my first employee a business partner and COO and Promoted second employee to a Director
Increased revenue by 150%
Decreased attrition

What’s next: Looking to expand the team even more this year, expand into diverse markets, invest in employee learning & development

74. Wilma

Founded: 2020
Founders: Terri Phipps, Mary Morrison
Website: www.getwilma.app

Elevator Pitch: Wilma is North America’s first membership ride service platform designed to address the safety concerns for women & gender diverse people. We are Women Driving Women

How it got started: As corporate women we knew the challenges of feeling safe, confident & comfortable when requiring ride hailing services. We also shared the many “stories” we fabricated to feel safer with male drivers. We got busy researching the ride hailing industry which revealed: disparity for women drivers & the heart wrenching stories of sexual assaults or worse. In fact a nationwide link was established for riders who were assaulted in a ride share thru www.helpingsurvivors.org We saw the opportunity to create a membership community that promotes economic opportunity for women drivers and safe passage for riders in the cities they work, live and play. The membership model is our USP as it allows the business to pay a generous 85% of ride revenues to drivers, and members never pay a booking fee which is on average $3.85 – $5.00 per ride! The ride hail business is on a significant growth trajectory projected $76B in ‘25 with YOY growth of 7.5%. The subscription industry continues to grow at 25% YOY. Our national survey revealed that women would choose a women driver 100% of the time and Wilma wants to be that choice!

Growth to date: The initial focus has been attracting and building a team who brings great experience and passion for the problem we are looking to solve. Our tech team is led by CTA-luca Maraschi, former Chief Solutions Architect for Telus. Our operations team has tier one talent with COO- Ashleigh Berger, previous GM for Lyft, Toronto , CFO- Sampson Chan, MBA, CPA, expert in start ups, former VP finance at ONYX and CMO- Sheila Murray, previous VP of Marketing at Starbucks. Wilma is confident we have the team to build out a billion dollar company.

What’s next: London Ontario is our MVP launch city December ‘22. The city presents great insights, access to stakeholders and lessons learned in a tech friendly environment. Our initial traction numbers will be part of our strategy to raise our seed round of $6M USD for 20%. We will be expanding into the US in 2023 and are currently finalizing plans for short listed US cities.

Ask from the community: If you share our passion and commitment to make a difference for women and gender diverse individuals we would like to hear from you. This includes individuals who have a story to share, full stack experienced developers,social influencers, corporate clients who see partnership alignment and investors who want to be making a difference and joining the ride! Wilma is uniquely positioned to be a disruptor in an existing market with a focus on safety, comfort and empowerment for the women & gender diverse people we know and care for in our lives.

73. Moxy Patch

Founded: 2022
Founder: Remy Warren
Website: www.MoxyPatchUSA.com

Elevator Pitch: MoxyPatch is an over the counter device used to prevent the mild to moderate leaks due to stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in females. MoxyPatch aims to humanize leaks by getting the conversation started about SUI and to offer an eco-friendly and accessible solution for the 1/3 of all women who experience this frustrating and often embarrassing problem.

How it got started: Recognizing the need for an over-the-counter and accessible product that actually prevents leaks instead of just absorbing them (like many disposable products on the market today), MoxyPatch Founder, Remy Warren, set out to design and create a patent-pending and eco-friendly solution to this common problem faced by many women.
Growth to date: Initial user feedback has been received on MoxyPatch and has been ‘overwhelmingly positive’. MoxyPatch, (dba: Remy-Int’l Consumer Products.) is Registered with the FDA and is working to finalize the official launch date for the U.S. in the next couple of months.

What’s next: Setting the official launch date for MoxyPatch!

Ask from the community: Support MoxyPatch by following @MoxyPatch on social – Instagram, Facebook & LinkedIn and sign up to their newsletter at MoxyPatchUSA.com for exciting updates about their launch.

72. Blsh Delivery

Founded: 2021
Founder: Sarah Brown, Jay Singh, Kate Brown
Website: www.BLSH.online

Elevator Pitch: BLSH brings a better delivery experience than Amazon to small businesses and consumers. The BLSH delivery marketplace connects anyone with e-commerce delivery needs to a network of vetted independent couriers through our platform. BLSH is able to fulfill requests for almost anything, anywhere by using a dynamic market-based approach to pricing that can handle a variety of requests.

How it got started: We wanted delivery for everything else to be as easy as the on-demand apps have made ordering lunch, but in a way that was accessible to independent couriers, small businesses and customers. It seemed crazy that restaurants were being charged commissions as high as 30% and we thought instead of trying to build ‘Uber for Retail’ we could do better.

Growth to date: Following the Lean Startup approach, we used a basic MVP to grow to $10K+ a month in sales and realized at that point we had hit a bottleneck for what we could take on without further product development. We raised a small friends and family round of $150K in the fall and started work on building out our product.

What’s next: BLSH is raising a seed round in the new year to expand on our technical and marketing efforts. We expect the launch of our app in early 2022 to 5x our growth within the current geographic footprint.

Ask from the community: We believe that people are always at the heart of any great business and even more so for an early startup. We’re looking to hire driven and creative people for our tech team to help us execute on an enormous vision. We’re in the early stages of creating our advisory team and would love to connect with other founders that have scaled marketplace business models. Lastly, with our pending seed raise we’ll be casting a big net to find the right investors to support us in the near and long term vision.

71. Visto

Founded: 2019
Founders: Josh Schachnow, Alex Ghattas
Website: https://visto.ai/

Elevator Pitch: We make preparing and filing study visas easy for international students and their lawyers/consultants

How it got started: Josh is an immigration lawyer who, after spending years building his own law firm, was frustrated with all of the repetitive tasks and admin work lawyers have to do in immigration. So he teamed up with Alex and they’ve been building immigration tech ever since!

Growth to date: Visto started as a side project in 2019, and now has a small team, 10s of thousands of users and dozens of Canadian companies it has helped thanks to all of the immigration tech launched in the last 3 years. They’re now focused on the international student space, and have automated the entire study visa process!

What’s next: Visto has huge plans to continue building out and scaling its study visa platform, which helps students and their lawyers/consultants prep documents, auto-fill PDFs, and everything else needed to apply. The platform already makes the process quicker and easier, and is getting better with new features every week!

Ask from the community: We love working with companies that help international students come to Canada. Lawyers, consultants, Canadian schools and more can really benefit from our platform, and we’d love to chat with them!

70. Intribe

Founded: 2021
Founder: Sven Radavics
Website: https://www.intribe.co/

Elevator Pitch: intribe helps startups and SMEs lower their Customer Acquisition Costs and expand their reach by making partnerships easier. Intribe is a platform that connects complementary brands with potential partners and collaborators. It’s like “Tinder for brand partnerships and collaborations.” Like-minded brands have the customers you want. Acquire them with intribe.

How it got started: Our founder and CEO Sven Radavics was literally solving his own problem. Running global sales and marketing at a Chicago startup, the team didn’t have the networks that Sven was familiar with to easily drive partnership driven growth. He figured there must be a platform for this, but he couldn’t find one and right there the idea for intribe was born. Taking hours of work and reducing it to a few minutes of searching the right platform

Growth to date: intribe has a product in market with paying customers and is getting closer to product market fit. We have raised 100K of our 500K pre-seed round including an investment from Draper Startup House ventures.

What’s next: intribe is positioned well to take advantage of an industry changing tailwind with the death of the third party tracking cookie. Intribe is focused on building out the machine learning aspects of the product and is focused intensely on growth. The death of the third party tracking cookie is a strong tailwind that will help to drive growth. There are two things we’re laser focused on right now, growth and building out the automations on the platforms.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for a growth marketing lead and further angel and/or pre-seed investment funds.

69. Deeded

Founded: 2020
Founder: Reuven Gorsht
Website: https://deeded.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Deeded is reimagining the closing experience for Real Estate. By combining advanced technology and deep expertise, Deeded delivers a seamless real estate closing experience for all parties in a transaction. Think of it as the “check out button” when you’re buying or selling a home. You can seamlessly complete your closing online.

How it got started: Reuven’s (founder) most recent home buying experience quickly turned from excitement to a disappointment that left him and his family spending a weekend at the local Holiday Inn because because of an unexpected delay with his closing. After spending weeks dealing with the aftermath, Reuven noticed how inefficient and opaque the closing process was and how most of the technology used to manage the process was from the 1990s. Deeded was born to bring the closing experience to the 21st century, making home buying the happy and exciting moment that it should be.

Growth to date: Lots of homeowners closed seamlessly (and with rave reviews). Expanded in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, with more provinces to be launched in 2023.

What’s next: We’re expanding our platform and products to solve for many of the friction points that happen when buying or selling a home, adding value and making it a great experience for everyone involved in the transaction.

Ask from the community: We’re hiring in sales, technology and operations.

68. Equivesto

Founded: 2017
Founders: Ryan Correia & Alexander Morsink
Website: https://equivesto.com

Elevator Pitch: Equivesto is an Equity Crowdfunding portal and licenced Exempt Market Dealer that enables everyday Canadians to invest in vetted startups, small businesses, and real estate opportunities, starting at only $100 CAD. Through our service, founders can raise up to $1.5M from their customers, fans, followers, and extended community and any amount from traditional Angels and VCs.

How it got started: Inspired by the personal struggles of Alex & Ryan raising capital for past startups from the limited number of Angel Investors. New regulation in Canada + global precedence opened the door for founders to raise capital from their extended community and general public through registered funding portals. It took us 2-3 years to get licensed and we launched the Equivesto portal in September 2020.

Growth to date: 15M+ invested, 4000+ investor members, 35+ campaigns, Expanded to across Canada in 2022

What’s next: We are looking to help even more founders get funded and investors get interested in private investing by creating FREE and accessible education. We also plan to improve our ecosystem engagement though the hosting of in-person and online events and the further growth of our partnership network.

Ask from the community: Join one (or all 😊) of the following 👉 Bi-weekly Investor Newsletter | Create an Account | Learning Centre | Equivesto Community.

67. Simply Eloped

Founded: 2016
Founders: Janessa White and Matt Dalley
Website: https://simplyeloped.com/

Elevator Pitch: Weddings are costly, stressful, time-consuming and let’s be honest, usually not very fun to plan. Simply Eloped is the top elopement company in the US and makes the process of planning a wedding for 20 guests or less easy, cost-conscious and enjoyable! We personalize every ceremony we do – from cat backpacks to Lord of the Rings themed ceremonies. Located in 34 destinations around the US, Simply Eloped has everything you need for your magical day.

How it got started: Back in 2016 couple Matt Dalley and Janessa White teamed up to embark on the path to redefine what wedding planning could look like. From day one they began scaling their technology and building a marketplace infrastructure to aid couples and wedding vendors/venues. To date, Simply Eloped has married over 10,000 couples!

Growth to date: To date, we are in 34 destinations around the US, have married over 10,000 couples and are on track to hit 9M in bookings for 2023.

What’s next: We’re about to launch a new program called OMG Elopements which will be luxury elopements (think helicopters, hot air balloons and more!). We’re also launching a sister company called Wedfora which will be leveraging the tech Simply Eloped has built and allow couples and vendors to connect directly on our all-in-one planning platform.

Ask from the community: If you know someone who is engaged, send them our way! 😉 

66. myWellaBee

Founded: 2021
Founders: Aziz Shariff, Dr Nerissa D’Silva
Website: https://mywellabee.com/

Elevator Pitch: On a mission to make Food Freedom a Reality for the 1/2 Billion people around the planet that struggle with food allergies & intolerances via our proprietary deep tech (AI/ML) food search engine

How it got started: Aziz is a Dad on a mission. His young family has a complicated relationship with food. They struggle with heaps of food allergies and intolerances and find the process of navigating food options to be a minefield.

So he recruited an all-star team of allergy specialists (Dr Nerissa D’Silva), dietitians, and techies to solve this problem for his family and millions of families like his around the planet by building myWellaBee – a food search engine that empowers families to discover food freedom.

Growth to date:
myWellaBee Beta now available in 2 markets – Australia and New Zealand, with plans to rapidly expand into North America as early as 2023-24
Over 16,000 vetted food products to choose from
20,000 visitors & growing daily
Revenue generating
Pilots with several reputable food brands, retailers – and we’re just getting started.

What’s next:
Acceleration of Australia & NZ User Growth + Monetisation
Tech Groundwork for USA & Canada expansion in 2023-24

Ask from the community:
Seeking Purpose driven Investors/VCs that are excited to build a global billion dollar platform that will improve the lives of millions of families around the planet.
Pre-seed Round2, $1M – Monetisation Acceleration & Scaling to North America

65. Payd

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jonathan Hillis
Website: www.paydapp.ca

Elevator Pitch: The scenario today: Global student debt is at its highest, with over 3 Trillion US Dollars. With pandemic job cuts and increasing number of debtors and defaulters, it has turned into a crisis. We created payd, an all-in-one self-serve solution that will allow students to pay off their loans effortlessly, while they attend school and when they graduate. Leveraging its first true card-linked technology, payd layers banking, savings, investing, cash-back, crowdsourcing and more into the on-campus student card experience. With every tap, students will be able to grow their savings and eventually, pay off their loans.

How it got started: It all started when Jonathan Hillis began assisting student unions with their insurance needs and creating mental health programs and solutions. In the process he realized that despite debt repayment being one of the top three stressors amongst students, the issue was completely overlooked by the authorities. Fast forward to 2020, payd was found by Jon. The core of this one-of-a-kind financial technology is that it puts savings on autopilot.

Growth to date: payd has successfully raised capital on a substantial valuation and continues to raise funds to rapidly scale and grow.

What’s next: The next phase will be establishing partnerships with 3-5 pilot schools, developing the all-in-one integrated student cards and soon after, venture into the global markets. These partnerships will see payd reach 150,000-200,000 users in our first year.

Ask from the community: Since payd’s valuation is rapidly increasing with each new client and user on our platform, we’re currently looking to grow our investors who have the ability to help payd reach new heights. Please email jon@paydapp.ca for more information on investment opportunities.

64. The Leansuite

Founded: 2021
Founder: Angad Singh and Prabhpahul Singh
Website: www.theleansuite.com

Elevator Pitch: We facilitate the digitization and implementation of various Lean programs for our clients by connecting the people, the data, and the processes. With squeezing margins, an increase in competitors, and digital transformation in manufacturing on the rise, companies are struggling to keep up with the intensive administrative work required to run operations at optimal levels, while simultaneously keeping costs low. TheLeanSuite can help. Our software is a cloud-based platform that offers various built-in apps designed to assist and elevate all the essential tasks required to run a shop-floor.

How it got started: With over a decade of knowledge and experience in the manufacturing industry, Angad and Prabhpahul felt the need to close the gap that existed between the people, the data, and the processes. It began with the vision to make manufacturing more agile — where employees are more involved and engaged, data is more readily accessible, and processes are more digital and less paper-based.

Growth to date: We’ve launched the Suggestion Platform and the Issue Tracker and have received encouraging and supportive feedback from our pilot users. We are also using some cutting edge technology

What’s next: As we’re still new to the game, Year 2023 will continue to be fundamental for TheLeanSuite’s growth and establishment. A major focus of ours this year will be to increase our community and clients.

Ask from the community: TheLeanSuite hopes to create a strong community with their followers and potential partners, and to connect and collaborate with TPM, WCM, Six Sigma, and Lean consultants to improve and strengthen their relationship with their respective clients.

63. Souqh 

Founded: 2021
Founder: Ahmer Rafiq
Website: https://souqh.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Souqh is building Canada’s real estate and home services marketplace to simplify and digitize the home ownership journey. We are an all-in-one solution eliminating the chaos of sourcing and managing fragmented service providers, allowing home buyers/owners/sellers to simply connect, collaborate and transact with vetted real estate and home services professionals – all from one platform

How it got started: The experience for home buyers/owners across real estate and home services is ripe for disruption. Over the last 10 years of working with real estate and home services professionals, I continued to see a gap in the customer experience working across these fragmented vendors. While technology has made advancements to improve the customer experience across several verticals, real estate transactions have remained fairly unorganized and fragmented. We started Souqh to put an end to his age-old home ownership journey.

Growth to date:
1. We have onboarded 3,000+ real estate/home services professionals onto our marketplace across Ontario
2. Grew our marketplace traffic 20x to 20,000+ visits/month
3. Over 3.6M social media impressions and over 1.2M users reached
4. Partnered with 10 real estate boards and associations across Ontario
5. Launched multiple brokerage level deals with Sotheby’s, Re/Max, P2 Realty, etc.
6. Partnered with Rentals for New Comers, to connect immigrants with Realtors and assist with finding rentals across Ontario
7. Accepted into The DMZ incubator program, which is the top university based tech incubator in the world

What’s next:
1. Starting our seed raise
2. Expanding to BC/AB in 2023
3. Launching Mobile app

62. Hula

Founded: 2021
Founder: Hailey Ji
Website: https://www.hula-events.com/

Elevator Pitch: HULA is an offline social tool that matches users with like-minded companions to attend mutually interested IRL events together. Just like Uber “everyone can go anywhere”. For HULA, it’s “everyone can find someone to go do something IRL together”

How it got started: Originating from our personal pain points as EXPATs & Gen Zs living in the U.S. over years, our thesis is that one’s existing friend circle cannot fulfill all their IRL needs, and there’s a gap in modern-day technology offering between dating and BFF solutions. Different from interest-based meetup platforms, HULA aims to leverage recommendations to targeted connect the right people for their next offline experience within 48 hours.

Growth to date: Launched beta IOS app in NYC since last summer and have seen tremendous growth and engagement among the African American W25-35 community. To date, HULA has welcomed 10k+ community members and facilitated 8k+ online-to-offline connections. HULA also established B2B2C partnerships with Ticketmaster, Ticket Evolution, and 70+ lo6al NYC vendors.

What’s next: In 2023, HULA will focus on strengthening its ML-led pairing algorithm to help more people get connected with like-minded companions faster for offline experiences. HULA will also focus on achieving it’s modern 4-way marketplace ecosystem that’s focused on a.) community discovery (friend discovery, event discovery), and b.) community building (creators, vendors, ticketing platforms, consumers) to reinvent being social.

61. LabsCubed

Founded: 2016
Founders: Khaled Boqaileh (CEO), Ammar Jafar (CTO), Jeffrey Petracca (COO)
Website: www.labscubed.com

Elevator Pitch: At LabsCubed we enable material innovators to create better polymers faster with advanced automation, software, and AI tools.

How it got started: The concept of LabsCubed began while the founders worked in industry developing new innovative materials. Frustrated with the slow-pace and tediousness of development, the idea of a new method of material development was spawned. Materials play a crucial role in the advancement of innovations, but development of novel materials, such as environmentally friendly sustainable plastics, can easily run over a decade. The founder’s of LabsCubed experienced this problem firsthand and began a journey to learn from hundreds of industry experts about the challenges they face and determine the reasons behind long development cycles. By the end of the discovery process it had become clear that the material development process was highly iterative and bottlenecked by its manual nature. Nearly every step in the development cycle was manual including figuring out what ingredients to mix, mixing the ingredients, testing each iteration of the material, analyzing data, and determining the next steps. 5 years ago LabsCubed started with a goal of building a tech stack of automated hardware, sophisticated vision systems, modular designs,secure industrial IoT connectivity , intuitive software, and AI tools. Combining all these together LabsCubed is set on reducing development times from decades to months.

Growth to date: LabsCubed raised funds in a pre-seed from Greensky, MARS IAF as well as many great angels. This round fueled the growth and despite supply chain uncertainties and sales interruptions since the start of the pandemic, they have seen growth in revenue increase by 150% year over year.

What’s next: For 2023 the goals are to expand our product lines to cover new materials/tests, grow sales globally and continue to grow our awesome team. Ask from the community: We are looking for partners in the polymer industry including experts/companies in plastics and rubbers.

Ask from the community: We are looking for partners in the polymer industry including experts/companies in plastics and rubbers.

60. Functionland 

Founded: 2021
Founders: Ehsan Shariati, Keyvan Sadeghi, Kate Withers Hess, Erfan Shekarchi, Aaron Maines, Sheida Shahbaz, Jonathan Groeneveld, Masih Derkani 
Website: https://fx.land

Elevator Pitch: Functionland is breaking the traditional cloud storage monopoly and challenging the service subscription economy with a new p2p platform that makes it easy for people to share storage and compute resources providing speeds as fast as the cloud and cheaper with total data ownership

How it got started: Peter Schiff once said, “Bitcoin isn’t a sound money.” And we web3 builders are all building sounds and shapes for it. We, humans, create tons of data every second. But unless this information is organized and processed and turned into information, it’s useless. Right now, we delegate the task of storing our data to a few central cloud providers, and they also organize and process our data. But why is this centralization bad? First, they don’t share all of the created information with us. Even worse, they sometimes use the created information to predict and manipulate our behavior. Make us buy that cool new shoe that I just searched for because now I see it everywhere on Instagram! And still worse, they can change the terms and pricing whenever they want, since they are in full control of our data.

The co-founders of Functionland all knew each other and worked with each other previously, and once Google announced that they would remove the free tier from their Photos app, an app that was marketed to be free forever, we grouped together to put a stop to the monopoly of cloud. We at Functionland are building a whole ecosystem that replaces the cloud. Applications, monetization for open-source developers and influencers, and storage and computing, all in a decentralized way. Check out our “Fx Fotos” and “Fx Files”, two open-source alternatives to the central ones to see it in action.

Growth to date: We started as a 2 people company and grew now to a team of more than 10. We raised a seed round last year and participated in two world-class accelerators Outlier Ventures accelerator and Techstars, where we could improve the idea by talking with experts in the field. We then partnered with Yves Behar, one of the leading industrial designers, to design the future of the cloud. And we partnered with Shaun Neff, the mind behind many brands like Moon Oral Care by Kendal Jenner and Robinhood, to create a brand people can trust and create a People-owned network.
We have commercialized two hardware products, Fx Blox Lite and our Dev kit, and launched 2 applications to the Google Play Store, Apple Store and the Microsoft store for the desktop version of Fx Files!

What’s next: Our early community members will be receiving their Fx Blox Indiegogo purchases, and our Dev kits will be coming off the production lines and be shipped to those keen to play with the kit and get inspired themselves to build hardware and software dApps for the ecosystem. Our teams and devs in the community, continue to experiment with our testnet and provision for our canary net architecture. We look forward to developing partnerships with strong developer-oriented chains like Polkadot, and continuing to liaise with our Layer2 partners, including Polygon.

Ask from the community: We urge everyone to check out our first decentralized applications and leave feedback for us to enhance them. For now, the local features are implemented and integration with the network is in progress:
Fx Files: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=land.fx.files (Also available on Microsoft Store for Windows)
Fx Fotos: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=land.fx.fotos (Also available on Appstore for iOS)

59. VanHack

Founded: 2015
Founder: Ilya Brotzky
Website: www.vanhack.com

Elevator Pitch: VanHack connects companies with top-tier diverse tech talent, wherever they are in the world. Trusted by 1000+ companies worldwide, including Brex,1Password, Thinkific, Bench, and SkiptheDishes rely on VanHack to fill their intermediate/senior developer roles from its community of 420,000+ tech professionals all ready to work remotely or relocate. VanHack provides end-to-end hiring support. Our platform sources, screens and matches the right talent to your job in minutes. After a hire is made, our in-house hiring and global mobility experts offer additional assistance with remote starts and relocation services.

How it got started: Ilya had been living in Brazil where he met many software engineers looking for job opportunities abroad. And in 2015, VanHack was initially conceived as an ed-tech company helping candidates get hired in North America. The community of VanHackers scaled quickly and Ilya found that many employers were struggling with the tech talent shortage, and were interested in tapping into the global tech talent pool. That’s when VanHack evolved into a tech-enabled global recruiting company.

Growth to date: VanHack has helped fast-growing companies make over 1900 hires, tracking well to hit the 2K milestone in 2023 🚀

What’s next: To become a global tech recruiting powerhouse — VanHack aims to connect innovative companies with diverse talent from across the globe.

Ask from the community: If you are looking to hire developers outside your local labour market, quote “Founders Beta”at signup and be eligible for 25% off placement fees off your first hire.

58. Pilot

Founded: 2020
Founders: Connor Wilson, Taher Kathawala, Abigail Udvari, Avinash VK, Yu-Wei Hung
Website: pilotplans.com

Elevator pitch: Today Pilot is a Social Trip Planner that helps travelers plan and share trips with friends, helping you save time, stress, and have more fun. You sign up, create a trip plan or wishlist, start adding things to it, save everything in one place, share with friends, and then use it as your itinerary while you travel! It’s currently an easier and more fun alternative to Google Docs/sheet. We’re building discovery, planning, booking and sharing functionality to turn Pilot into the single hub for all your travels. Everything you need in one place to have an awesome time and make memories.

Growth to date: We have ~330k monthly traffic, $750k funding, 11k users, ~10 FTEs, and close to ~$200k in annualized ad revenue (from web traffic, not our monetization strategy).

What’s next: This year we plan to release our discovery tools, enabling users to find all the relevant travel information, activities, and locations they need to plan their trips in one place. The ability to easily find deals and book those things directly from their itinerary plan will follow!

Ask from the community: We plan to raise a larger round of funding this year, and would love to connect with anyone interested. We’re also happy to help other founders do the same!

57. RealSage

Founders: Arunabh Dastidar, Gaurav Madani, Zain Nathoo
Website: https://www.realsage.com/

Elevator Pitch: RealSage is an AI-driven SaaS platform that helps decision-making in multifamily real estate. Data management in this sector is often confusing and complicated, relying on basic spreadsheet technology that leaves asset owners and operators vulnerable to cost overruns and missed opportunities for long-term returns. RealSage helps asset owners turn their data into cash and asset returns.

How it started: The founders, with experience in large-scale asset operations, identified the problem through discussions with industry experts.

Growth to date: 40% quarter-on-quarter growth since 2022, with users including top Canadian real estate companies like Oxford Properties, InterRent REIT, and Cogir.

What’s next: Continuing to simplify the lives of asset owners and accelerate our growth.

Ask from the community: We are looking for channel partners to support and accelerate our group.

56. Huex Labs

Founded: 2018
Founder: Anik Seth, Kiran Kadekoppa
Website: http://www.huex.ai/

Elevator Pitch: Voice is the invisible interface and has seen the most traction as demand for contactless services increased. Brick and Mortar and Retail locations are facing severe labor crises. We are bringing voice automation and providing a digital employee to augment their ground staff.

How it got started: We are ourselves Quick Service Restaurant operators and have seen the challenges first hand – how it affects the bottomline, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. We firmly believed that “Technology” is the only way to bring a significant change to address the ongoing challenges. We are automating the whole interaction process customers have with the SMEs, Retail businesses. We see our service to provide both Voice Automation in the customer facing side as well as more real time analytics for the employees managing the restaurants and retail locations.

Growth to date: We have a huge interest from both VCs, device manufacturers, and some notable names in the Toronto area. We are already running paid pilots programs across several locations. We are planning to launch a pilot with another US-based Food chain.

What’s next: We want to deploy our solution rapidly and expand across Food / Restaurant chains, followed by expansion into Retail, Healthcare and other industries.

Ask from the community: We are looking for anyone interested in our mission to democratize Voice-AI based automation. We want to explore and conduct “Discovery” workshops with potential clients who may be interested to understand what is possible through “Voice Automation” and how their businesses could benefit from them and bring more digital services to their respective customers. We are also in the midst of fundraising so if you are an interested investor in our mission, please connect with us!

55. Agora

Founded: 2022
Website: https://nounsagora.com/

Elevator Pitch: Agora builds tooling to make the governance participation of decentralized organizations a frictionless and transparent process for all participants. Ultimately, with the goal of enabling ecosystems to grow and thrive.

How it got started: Agora first started with the support of Nouns DAO, to help improve the governance experience for builders and contributors.

What’s next: Agora is now live on a number of major DAOs and continuing to expand!

Ask from the community: Looking to hire and grow the team!

54. WorkTango 

Founded: 2015
Founders: Rob Catalano, Nadir Ebrahim, Bjarke Jungberg Grouleff
Website: https://www.worktango.com/

Elevator Pitch: At WorkTango, we’re revolutionizing how the world’s most forward-thinking companies engage and inspire their people. We offer the only holistic Employee Experience Platform built for the modern workplace that enables meaningful recognition and rewards, offers actionable insights through employee surveys, and supports alignment through goal setting and feedback.WorkTango is built for the workplace we all want to be a part of – where priorities become clear, achievements are celebrated, and employees have a voice. Learn more at worktango.com.

How it got started: Co-founders Rob Catalano & Nadir Ebrahim spent over a decade growing another HR Technology company called Achievers and after that business was sold, started WorkTango with a Passion to improve (work) lives. We brought on Bjarke to build the technology and our passion coupled with surrounding ourselves with great people and partners led to explosive growth.

Growth to date: WorkTango has since merged with another HR Technology organization called Kazoo to bring a more robust Employee Experience platform to the market. With over 1,000 customers and around 150 employees, the company is poised to continue growth with a more robust and differentiated platform.

What’s next: On the heels of merging both companies together, what’s next includes going to market with a new WorkTango brand and platform in 2022 and continue the journey of innovating on the technology, going to market with supporting our community to build great workplaces and focus on bringing on key, passionate talent to the orgnaiztaion.

Ask from the community: Always looking to hire; connect with passionate HR leaders, and building our community of likeminded people.

53. Truly Financial

Founder: 2021
Founders: Kanchan Kumar (CEO), Sandeep Todi (Chief Business Officer)
Website: https://trulyfinancial.com

Elevator Pitch: Truly Financial’s U.S. domiciled checking account and corporate Visa cards unblock spend management for remote teams in any country, and simplify daily business banking.

How it got started: Small businesses are consistently falling through the gap between business payments and business banking. This no man’s land has entrepreneurs juggling multiple services like cards, banks, and payment providers – cobbling together solutions that are rarely water tight and that come at a high cost to their business. After successfully building a platform for Canadian businesses to send payments to 150+ countries, Kanchan and Sandeep decided to build a financial service that would bridge this gap. Truly Financial’s all-in-one banking service with corporate Visa cards, in-built spend management capabilities, and multi-currency accounts are designed to support entrepreneurs and empower their distributed teams. As the world increasingly becomes a global marketplace, Truly Financial aims to set up smaller businesses for success by enabling them to operate and scale on an international stage.

Growth to date: Raised $3.2 million

What’s next: We plan to continue expanding our offering via banking and payment integrations with other software products that serve the needs of entrepreneurs. We are also introducing a perks program that will offer our customers curated products and services from our partners.

Ask from the community: Connecting with partners – have a product or service that’s perfect for smaller businesses? Talk to us about our perks program! Looking for people across Product, Marketing, Customer Support, and Sales. Actively hiring for a product marketing and communications specialist, customer support specialists, and sales development representatives.

52. MinuteBox

Founded: 2017
Founders: Daniel Levine, Steven Pulver, and Sean Bernstein
Website: https://www.minutebox.com/

Elevator Pitch: MinuteBox offers a cloud-based entity management and minute book solution built for law firms, accounting firms, and corporate counsels to help streamline workflows, promote collaboration, and reduce inefficiencies inherent in corporate records management.

How it got started: Three former lawyers saw an opportunity to dramatically change the entity management space, which in many cases sees firms still relying on physical books or outdated, on-premise technology. Two of those founders had a history together with Fireside Conference – an annual off-the-grid retreat for tech founders, investors, and leaders – and they joined forces with the third to dream up the idea of bringing modern cloud technology to an industry that has traditionally been slow to adapt to change.

Growth to date: MinuteBox works with 3 of the top 7 law firms in Canada and more than a hundred customers worldwide. Revenue has grown more than 500% each of the last two years.

What’s next: MinuteBox is looking to continue its growth trajectory through 2023, with significant hiring being done across all departments. The leadership team has been bolstered by industry veterans and the team is expected to triple in the coming months.

Ask from the community: We are looking to hire top talent across multiple departments and get our name out to as many law firms, accounting firms, and corporate counsels as possible. Introductions and referrals are greatly appreciated from the community, even if just exploratory.

51. ContentBot

Founded: 2021
Founder: Nick Duncan
Website: https://contentbot.ai

Elevator Pitch: Write content 10x faster with the help of AI.

How it got started: ContentBot exists to help founders and content marketers create more meaningful content easier and faster. AI has come a long way since I first got excited about the concept 20+ years ago. With the advancement of OpenAI’s GPT-3, I was finally able to make a product that could add considerable amount of value to time-strapped founders and content marketers. As a founder, I know how hard it is to swap those “hats” as we move from marketing to product dev to support and back again. Having an AI take on the bulk of creating content for my startup is an amazing way for me to free up more time to do other essential items that will help my startup succeed. This is the reason ContentBot exists today.

Growth to date: 60k users and $18k MRR

What’s next: Grow, grow and grow some more. We are heavily focused on our customers at this stage and we are committed to fully understanding what levers to pull next.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for investors at this stage to help fuel our growth.

50. Blanka

Founded: 2021
Founders: Kaylee Astle, Adam Chuntz, Doug Long
Website: https://blankabrand.com/

Elevator Pitch: Blanka is a platform that helps anyone start their own branded product line. Blanka deals with everything you don’t want to handle: sourcing suppliers, personalizing products with your branding, and fulfilment. Plus, Blanka doesn’t have any MOQs and works with any ecommerce platform.

How it got started: The concept of Blanka emerged a few years ago, when Kaylee wanted to start her own ecommerce side hustle, selling SPF products. After days of research into the process of private labeling, she quickly learned that this wasn’t going to be an easy endeavour. This also was a lightbulb moment when she realized millions of other entrepreneurs must face the same headaches when trying to launch their own product line.That’s how Blanka was born!
Growth to date: Since launching in early 2021, Blanka has helped thousands of people start their brands.

What’s next: In 2023, we are excited to continue growing! We have big plans to help the next wave of side-hustlers and entrepreneurs to launch their beauty brands with Blanka.

Ask from the community: We are always looking to connect with potential partners and investors.

49. WFHomie

Founded: 2020
Founders: Pavla Bobosikova (Co-founder and CEO), Reza Farahani (Co-founder)
Website: wfhomie.com

Elevator Pitch: WFHomie is the employee engagement analytics and culture-building platform for hybrid and distributed teams. The WFHomie platform identifies gaps in employee experience, and provides the toolset to automate the execution of virtual team-building experiences, activities and workshops, as well as onboarding, peer-to-peer appreciation, employee gifting and recognition. WFHomie enables companies to operate more effectively with data and the tools they need to attract and retain top talent. WFHomie is on a mission to redefine employer-employee relationships, and empower people to lead and organizations to support better work-lives.

How it got started: After the pandemic started, we both felt like something was missing in the workplace. It got way harder to build real human connections and find joy in the work. Simultaneously, it became very challenging for companies to get vibility into how engaged different teams are, and understand and be able to prevent burnout and top talent attrition. The rate of adoption of remote and hybrid work accelerated and is here to stay. At the same time, the great resignation and shortage of top tech talent proves that companies struggle with understanding employee experience and improving company culture. We’re here to fix that and help companies attract, engage, understand and retain top talent.

Growth to date: Raised $1.9M CAD, grew over 10x (1100%) YoY, improved work-lives of over 5,000 employees globally, working with teams at companies like Wealthsimple, Lane, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, TD, BMO and dozens of others.

What’s next: We’ve recently launched Kudos by WFHomie, which is a peer-to-peer appreciation Slack bot that lets you recognize your team mates directly in Slack. It’s free and a great way to boost team morale – give it a go! Next up, we’re focusing on People Analytics and empowering companies to operate more effectively with data. That means giving visibility into DEI and insights that will help prevent burnout and undesirable employee churn.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to hire developers, and connect with potential partners in the HR, People Ops and People Analytics space.

48. Surex

Founded: 2011
Founder: Lance Miller CEO/Matt Alston COO
Website: www.surex.com

Elevator Pitch: Surex is Canada’s Fastest-Growing Insurance Marketplace™ We aim to be the most trusted, transparent, and convenient way for Canadians to shop, compare and buy insurance products across Canada.

How it got started: Our CEO Lance Miller, bought a brick-and-mortar insurance company in a small town, around the same time the banks were starting to sell insurance. So with some innovative thinking along with a need to survive, he partnered with our COO Matt Alston, and came up with the idea to sell insurance online. They bootstrapped the business and have grown from selling in 1 province to over 10!

Growth to date: We have been in growth mode for a few years now and we are not slowing down. We have recently hired over 20 new insurance brokers across Canada, we are going to be doubling our tech team by the end of the year and as well as adding to our management team and CCS team. We also just recently announced our partnership with IA Financial Corporation, which will be a huge opportunity for us to reach our bigger growth goals aligned with a great partner.

What’s next: We want to ensure our process is easy, and seamless for the customer so we are doing everything we can to make our process just that. We are advancing our technology, security processes, adding innovative ideas, all to help us become a brand every Canadian household knows, uses, and trust with their insurance needs.

Ask from the community: We are looking to double our tech department this year including: Full Stack Developers, Web Application Developers, Business Analysts and Scrum Masters. We are consistently looking to grow our Distribution Teams across Canada including Licensed Sales and Service brokers, as well as multiple support positions as we scale. Leadership opportunities will be available as each of the departments continue to grow.

47. SingleKey

Founded: 2019
Founder: Viler Lika
Website: https://www.singlekey.com/

Elevator pitch: SingleKey is closing the trust gap between residential landlords and tenants by bringing transparency and accountability to the relationship. We guarantee rent for landlords, even if tenants don’t pay, so they can still make their mortgage payments. At the same time, we ensure that tenants can experience a fair and easy rental application process, while also helping them build credit by paying their rent on time.

How it got started: SingleKey started in 2019 when Viler Lika (Founder & CEO) left his job in banking to bring to market the first Rent Guarantee program in Canada. Soon after launch, we saw a lot of interest from the landlord community, and started the hard work of building the team and developing 2 additional products including Canada’s leading Tenant Credit & Background report and the first Automated Online Rent Collection platform for small landlords and tenants.
Growth to date: SingleKey has grown to service landlords across North America with its Tenant Reports, Rent Guarantee, and Rent Collection tools. The product-led approach has enabled efficient communication with our customer base, leading to our over 400 positive Google Reviews (4.8 star rating), 3X YoY growth, and partnerships with leading payment processors, financial institutions and insurance partners, as well as dozens of landlord & property management associations across the country.

What’s next: We have an exciting and ambitious product roadmap for 2023. In Q1 we plan to launch a brand new marketing website and a full update of our app that has been in the works for almost a year. The new app launch will also include new features: a tenant-facing portal, open banking tools, e-leasing functionality and an end-to-end rental onboarding platform to help provide landlords with an operating system to manage their properties!

Ask from the community: We’re looking for exceptional talent in product, marketing, and sales roles who believe that we can build a better rental experience for both landlords and tenants. Feel free to reach out to info@singlekey.com if our mission resonates with you!

46. PathMatch

Founded: 2019
Founder: Nancy Soni
Website: https://www.pathmatch.com/

Elevator Pitch: PathMatch is the first Career Navigation App for Gen Z (“Waze” for Your Career). We help today’s students navigate tomorrow’s workforce so they have the skills and experience needed to be competitive while making it easier for companies to hire them for paid internships and great jobs.

How it got started: After spending 20 years building teams for Snap, Warby Parker, Amazon, and hundreds of startups, Nancy noticed the growing volume of college graduates struggling to land jobs. After investigating and working with hundreds of college students, she realized that it stemmed from a mismatch between what universities teach, the limited careers students know about, and what employers now look for. The workforce is evolving so rapidly that millions are being left behind. pNancy and her co-founder, Ryan (former Google Software Engineer) build a career matching algorithm and pre-skilling platform to help students learn skills and connected hundreds of students to internships that built “hireability”. By landing that first internship, students were able to land additional internships/jobs far more easily. More importantly, they understood what it took to become “hireable”.

Growth to date: We launched our mobile app in September and are growing our user base by 20K MAU per month. We have over 60K students on our platform and have helped over 50K students select their career path and companies they’d like to work for in the future. We also launched our Employer Product recently and have offerings for SMB through Enterprise. We’re growing ARR 20% MoM.

What’s next: We’re focused on releasing new features for students and growing our user base. We’re also focused on adding more employers to our platform.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for intros to Heads/VPs of Early Career Talent charged with building intern and new grad programs. Any intros to companies looking for a more streamlined, digitally-focused approach to talent development and recruiting Gen Z would be greatly appreciated. Also, we’re happy to help any startups looking for interns.

45. tilr

Founded: 2021
Key people: Leah Carr, CEO, Kaanu Joshi, Head of Tech, Marc Witney, Head of Product, Elysha Ames, Head of Growth
Website: tilr.com

Elevator Pitch: tilr’s skills-first talent solutions allow leaders to measure and manage their team’s skills, create strategic development plans and make data-driven talent decisions.

How it got started: Originally in the Hiring space, we started talking to 100s of HR and People People and learned that the way we invest in learning and development is broken. We identified a disconnect between the goals of the employee and the needs of the organization resulting in time wasted for both sides and money wasted for the company. Our tool doesn’t just help with strategic investment in L&D, but it also helps companies use everyday tasks and projects as growth opportunities. At tilr we believe that everyone can succeed in their roles if companies set them up for success and continue to invest in them, so we built a tool to accomplish this.

Growth to date: tilr has received a grant from the Ontario Government’s Skill Development Fund for $1.3 million and has started onboarding lots of exciting companies

What’s next: Raising our Seed Round

Ask from the community: We would love introductions to companies that would be interested in learning how tilr can help them retain and growth their people

44. Sparrow 

Founded: 2021
Founders: Oren Singer, Gavin Servai
Website: https://sparrowshare.com/

Elevator Pitch: Sparrow is a purpose-led homesharing platform and community tackling two of the largest problems of our generation – housing affordability and loneliness. With over 12 million empty bedrooms in Canada and a growing loneliness epidemic, the time to reimagine how we use and share our housing space is now.

Sparrow matches together hosts who have spare rooms to people seeking budget-friendly places to live together with. Homesharing provides benefits to the hosts through earning extra income. Housemates benefit through a more affordable place to live. Both parties benefit from an increased sense of security, companionship, and community.

We believe there’s magic in living together, and we’re driving a movement that reimagines how we use and share space.

How it got started: Sparrow was started out of a collaboration between the CMHC to foster new, innovative ideas, and accelerate or scale solutions that address our country’s most pressing housing issues, and Accenture supporting young companies to realize their full potential. After analyzing Canada’s housing supply, we uncovered there are more than 12 million empty bedrooms. That’s a ton of empty and underutilized space with the potential to house our growing population.

Growth to date: Sparrow has raised $1M in funding from the CMHC and Accenture. Through our first year since launch, Sparrow has attracted over 3,000 platform members and expanded into 10 Canadian cities.

What’s next: Our plan is to bring Sparrow to every neighborhood across Canada. As our country continues to experience a housing affordability crisis, we are motivated to bring our solution to support Canadian renters and homeowners in order to ease the cost of housing by sharing space and enabling a world where people live better together.

Ask from the community: We will be raising our next round of funding in 2023 and looking for strategic investors to participate in our next round. We will also be expanding our team in 2023 hiring for roles in engineering, growth marketing, sales, and customer success.

43. Local Logic

Founded: 2015
Founders: Vincent-Charles Hodder, Gabriel Damant-Sirois, Colin Stewart
Website: https://locallogic.co/

Elevator Pitch: Local Logic, is digitizing the built world to make it universally understandable and actionable for consumers, investors, developers, and governments with the ambition of helping build cities that are more sustainable and equitable for the people that live in them. To achieve that dream, we’ve built proprietary insights on over 30Bn data points, that quantify the built world using data and AI. Our insights are used across the real estate vertical to inform decisions that impact the $217T real estate market throughout the US and Canada.

How it got started: It all started in 2014 at McGill University, where Vincent-Charles Hodder and Gabriel Damant-Sirois, two students enrolled in the master’s program in urban planning, created a tool for finding housing using criteria such as the distance from public transportation, the presence of local parks and even the amount of noise pollution. These two young men, plus Colin Stewart, another master’s student, were convinced that data had significant underexploited potential, so they decided to get into the field of urban data. “When we finished our master’s, we could have found a job as planners with the City of Montreal, but we said to ourselves we could have an impact on cities around the world, not just on a single city,” explains Vincent-Charles.

Growth to date: Total $10M in funding Series A for 8M
Over the last 3 years we have expanded from the Canadian to the US market, the US revenue now accounts for 48% of our revenue. We also have a 140% Net Revenue Retention – meaning not only our clients stay with us, their account size increases as we deliver more and more value.

What’s next: We’re in business to help build more sustainable cities, and we’re laser focused on bringing data and insights to more decision makers that impact the sustainability and livability of our cities. From developers to investors and financial institutions, we believe there is a huge opportunity to use data to measure and optimize decisions being taken by a number of stakeholders in the real estate industry.

Ask from the community: We are growing and looking for top talent, see open roles here: https://locallogic.co/careers/#openroles

42. System-3

Founded: 2021
Founders: Elan Pratzer, Malka Lewittes
Website: https://www.system-3.com/

Elevator Pitch: System-3 unlocks hidden talent helping companies achieve excellence and diversity in the Executive-Suite. The company has developed the Executive Leadership Readiness Simulation providing companies with an unbiased, objective, and accurate view of up-and-coming talent’s readiness for the Executive-Suite. The result is a more robust and diverse pipeline of emerging and diverse talent. Use cases include executive selection, promotion, leadership development, and succession planning.

How it got started: Our founder, Elan Pratzer, is a veteran of the executive search industry and former Managing Partner, Canada of Caldwell Partners, and Korn Ferry Canada. Elan was also responsible for reviving Top 40 under 40 in Canada and is a serial entrepreneur. Throughout his career, he became frustrated with the evaluation process of executives, which is often based on informal interviews and references. Experience (have you done this before?) and subjective judgment have
always reigned supreme in the decision-making processes. Yet, the net result of this methodology for companies has been lower than acceptable rates of successful hires and promotions, resulting in economic loss and opportunity, as well as the loss of up-and-coming and diverse internal talent. That frustration led Elan to founding System-3 with a team of I/O psychologists and technologists.

Growth to date: In only I.5 years, System-3 has built an impressive client list of established companies participating in transformational projects, securing subscription renewals, and continually adding new projects.

In 2022, System-3 built its team to 10 people including leaders of technology, Industrial and Organizational science, customer success, product development, sales, and privacy. The company closed new funding rounds including a prominent VC fund.

What’s next:  Further enhancement of our simulation technology, building a board product, and the development of synergistic channels and partners. Most importantly the
continued international deployment of the Executive Readiness Leadership Simulation

Ask from the community:  We are looking to partner with organizations, and companies whose mission is to advance diversity and excellence at the executive level across Canada and US. Please reach out if you are interested in partnering with System-3!

41. Pocketed

Founded: 2020
Founders: Brianna Blaney & Aria Hahn
Website: https://hellopocketed.io/

Elevator Pitch: Money is a leading barrier to entrepreneurship, and difficulty accessing capital disproportionately impacts women and other underrepresented founder groups. With billions of dollars available in free government money every year, we decided to build an alternative. With the goal of empowering entrepreneurs, we launched Pocketed. Our mission is to eliminate barriers for entrepreneurs.

Pocketed is simplifying access to funding – starting with grants, tax credits, and business incentives. Our user-focused platform makes funding your business a smooth, intuitive journey. In three minutes, make an account and our intelligent grant matching platform and marketplace of grant writers will help you find and apply for the right funding programs for your business.

How it got started: Building a business is HARD – and one of the biggest barriers is money, especially for women. As experienced founders, we get it. We’ve lived this pain, trying to find money to start and grow our own companies. Less than 3% of VC funding goes to women. And while we hope that changes, we found an alternative – we were accessing grant funding. We asked hundreds of entrepreneurs if they were using grants, and the answer was almost always no – over and over they told us that it’s hard to find the right programs and then painful to apply. We started out submitting grant applications for friends – and this quickly grew into Pocketed. There are billions of dollars in ‘free government money’ available every year in Canada and the US – and a lot of it goes unused. Pocketed is changing that. Because whether you’re building a start-up, a small business, or a side hustle – there is money out there to help you grow. Pocketed is on a mission to eliminate financial barriers for entrepreneurs.

Growth to date: We now serve over 9,500 companies, 48% of which identify as having a female founder. We’ve tripled the number of users in the last year and helped them secure millions of dollars. Pocketed helps businesses make their first critical hire, receive reimbursements for necessary equipment, or take even bigger risks in product development and innovation. Whether you’re a technology company or a fashion designer, small businesses have the ability to create jobs and eco-prosperity for their communities. Pocketed helps businesses make this impact faster with non-dilutive funding.

What’s next: Introducing Pocketed Enterprise, automated grants and incentives expertise at your fingertips. Pocketed Enterprise helps consultants, accountants, and professional services firms add value to their customers through identifying and securing eligible grants and incentive programs. We are excited to continue scaling across North America and beyond!

Ask from the community: Create your Pocketed account today at hellopocketed.io. Use code FoundersBeta for exclusive perks and discounts!

40. HiredHippo

Founded: 2020
Founder: Adam Gellert
Website: www.hiredhippo.ai

Elevator Pitch: HiredHippo makes the job application process more transparent for companies and job seekers. Like a dating app, HiredHippo allows companies and candidates to make a profile, and match with one another based on values, long-term goals, and other indicators of retention. If you’re a top-performer looking to find your work tribe, or a company tired of hiring wrong-fit candidates, get on HiredHippo. We’ve connected companies like TouchBistro, FundThrough, Empower, GrowthGenius, and Coinsquare with core members of their team, and look forward to helping you, too. Visit HiredHippo.ai to set up a profile and start swiping in under 10 minutes.

How it got started: After working in recruitment for 15+ years, CEO Adam Gellert recognized a gap in the industry he couldn’t ignore: today’s traditional hiring methods are outdated and ineffective. The job application process sucks for both job seekers and companies. He set out to design a new system that incorporates his extensive experience and proprietary tech built by his team at HiredHippo. It’s software built by recruiters for recruiters and talent to find each other.

Growth to date: With over 25,000+ and growing vetted Canadian-based startup and SMB talent, our customers can unlock a new way to hire.

What’s next: HiredHippo plans to build the go-to hiring marketplace for startups and SMBs, a full suite of services to gain access to talent, branding, hiring insights, and tracking. Candidates create one profile to get hired for the job they want most.

Ask from the community: We appreciate all support and interest in our mission to change hiring forever. Both companies and candidates can create a profile for free at www.hiredhippo.ai

39. Unwrapit 

Founded: 2017
Founders: Linsay Moran, Peter Deitz, Taylan Pince
Website: www.unwrapit.com

Elevator Pitch: Unwrapit is more sustainable corporate gifting at scale. We are on a mission to support companies and event planners as they seek a more recipient-focused, sustainable way to gift. Our digital platform is brandable, personalized and offers an unparalleled recipient experience without the logistical headache of managing physical gift items. Recipients are able to choose their gift from a curated list of our sustainably-minded gift options. It’s a win-win-win for our customers, their recipients and the planet.

How it got started: Peter (Deitz) initially conceived of the idea of a virtual gifting platform several years ago. After working on a more B2C version for several years, he came together with Linsay and Taylan in 2020 to bring the current B2B version to life. We believe that giving gifts and making a positive impact can be one and the same.

What’s next: Additional support for companies that already have an established corporate gifting program in place and need support to execute on it. Offering brand consistency alongside a unique recipient experience is what we do best and we look forward to supporting more brands going forward!

Ask from the community: Our ask is simple…if you’re thinking about gifting and/or incentives within your business, reach out to us! We’d love to chat about how we might be able to help minimize your logistics while maximizing the surprise and delight of your recipients.

38. Part3

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jack Sadler, Corey Stanford, Jess Luczycki
Website: https://www.part3.io

Elevator Pitch: Part3 is changing how Architects and Engineers manage construction through intelligent, collaborative task management and insightful analytics.

How it got started: Jess spent 10+ years working in construction, and, as a General Contractor, saw the explosion of ConstructionTech first hand before moving to an Architecture firm about 5 years ago. It was there Jess realized how technology and innovation has failed Architects. Working with Jack and Corey, who both have backgrounds in Tech consulting building custom solutions to new problems and industries, they teamed up to design something that could empower Architects to take back control of their projects.

In early 2022 the team raised a pre seed round lead by 519 Growth fund, including Capital Angel Network and investors from Shopify and 360 Insights.

Part3 now exists to do their part on removing waste from the construction industry, and helping design a built world that’s good for people and the planet.

Growth to date: Having built a team of 8 Part3 now serves Architects and Engineers across North America with over $2bn of active construction live on the platform.

What’s next: Part3 is cash efficient and growing fast. We’ll be hiring in 2023 and continuing to scale as fast as possible!

Ask from the community: We’re on the look out to meet great people! Send investors our way, and if you know great entrepreneurial folks looking to join as very early employees in Sales, Customer Success, or Software Development, send them our way!

37. ForwardAI 

Founded: 2021
Founders: Nick Chandi CEO & Co-Founder; Jag Barpagga CIO & Co-Founder, Joe Mutti CTO & Co-Founder
Key people: Jane Ingram
Website: https://www.forwardai.com/

Elevator Pitch: ForwardAI provides aggregated accounting and business data and is trusted by companies in 48 countries worldwide. ForwardAI’s technology makes it easy to gain more insight and control over financial information with a full suite of accounting data solutions for large enterprises like banks, lenders, and fintechs, as well as accountants, financial advisors, and small businesses. The Precise API facilitates modern enterprise and developer tech solutions, including powerful add-ons that proactively engage and retain business clients long-term. Forwardly connects accountants and bookkeepers with tools that help them directly manage and support small business cash flow.

How it got started: Our leadership team has made it their mission to help small businesses stay financially healthy. Co-founders Nick and Jag have worked in the accounting field for over 40 combined years. Starting in systems administration, they eventually founded and sold one of Canada’s largest accounting IT companies. While working on that project, they also founded and built from scratch an online accounting software used by over 40,000 businesses worldwide. Nick and Jag became increasingly aware of how complicated the small business loan application process was during the start of the pandemic. Their accounting users would request PDF statements weekly while applying for loans to provide new information to the lenders. For some SMBs, it took months to secure financing. These delays were confusing – and with their experience with accounting data, it seemed strange that lenders weren’t using technology to connect directly to the information they needed. After more research, they realized that small business services, in general, were underdeveloped across the banking industry. Determined to make a difference, ForwardAI was created to bridge the technology gap for financial institutions, lenders, and other fintechs.

Growth to date: Founded in 2021, we have seen immense success and interest in the financial industry in the past two years, with multiple interested blue-chip corporations reaching out to us. Currently, we have signed agreements with eleven (11) companies, with 14 additional companies in active sandbox development, including a top-tier bank in North America. Our clients are primarily lenders, working capital providers, or neobanks and are located across the globe from the USA, UK, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia. Some of our largest clients include Swoop Funding, C2FO, and Fintech Automation. In addition to our enterprise clients, we also provide the Forwardly cash flow management app for accountants and small business owners. More than 800 businesses in 48 countries have connected to us for cash flow forecasting. ForwardAI is currently bootstrapped by our founders, with no outside investment.

What’s next: We’re developing our current integration offerings by expanding to payments and commerce software such as Square, Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Marketplace, and Shopify. Meanwhile, we’re working on new product updates for our Precise API and add-ons like Predict as a Service to help financial institutions onboard and retain more small business clients. To better support small business owners and accountants, we are planning some exciting feature releases in 2023 for our Forwardly app. These updates will make it a one-stop shop for small business cash flow management and help improve cash flow for businesses worldwide.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to connect with like-minded fintechs, companies looking to gain more financial insights and control through accounting data, and anyone focused on making small business services (especially lending and banking) accessible to everyone. Our client growth in the last year has been massive, so we’re also expanding our
team. Please get in touch if you have fintech experience and want to help us support small businesses.

36. Wizeprep

Founded: 2017
Founders: Cyrus Moradian & Michael Maloon
Key People: Lindy Ledohowski
Website: https://www.wizeprep.com

Elevator Pitch: Wizeprep delivers a personalized, customized campus- and course-specific online study platform for students in high school, college, and university across North America that leverages proprietary technology to reduce study time and improve grades.

How it got started: Cyrus Moradian, our CEO, was inspired to support students in high stakes, high stress freshmen and sophomore courses when he realized that the difference between passing and failing one of those key courses could be the difference between successfully finishing a degree and dropping out. Students who can afford additional help get a head start and advantage over those who don’t have that support, so Cyrus set out on a mission to ensure that he could create affordable, on-demand, online help for students in those difficult Business and STEM courses designed to weed out students.

Growth to date: Year-over-year revenue increase fall semester 2022 compared with fall semester 2021 is 440% growth!

What’s next: We are launching our “MCAT Elite 515” prep course in 2023, designed to help students taking the MCAT this year to get a top top score. We’ve proven that we can help students improve their grades in tough courses at universities and colleges across North America, and we’ve taken that world-class pedagogy and approach and applied it to our new MCAT offering to make sure that students can get into the Med School of their dreams.

Ask from the community: Check out our new MCAT course, and share it with all your friends who might be thinking about Med School. Let’s start an MCAT prep revolution: https://www.wizeprep.com/mcat

Here’s our C-Suite from L-R: Lindy Ledohowski (COO), Cyrus Moradian (CEO & Cofounder), Sean Moen (CFO), and Mike Maloon (CTO & Cofounder)

35. Aterlo 

Founded: 2014
Founders: Gerrit Nagelhout (CEO), Dan Siemon (CPO), and Scot Loach (CTO)
Website: https://aterlo.com

Elevator Pitch: Created by Aterlo Networks, Preseem is an Edge Network Quality of Experience (QoE) Solution for internet service providers (ISPs) that enables proactive management of networks to achieve higher subscriber satisfaction while lowering costs and increasing revenue. We enable local and regional ISPs to thrive by solving network problems with products that people love.

How It Got Started: Aterlo began in 2014 when three experienced network professionals (our founders!) teamed up to create a solution that allowed users to stream video online without any lag or buffering, regardless of the quality of their internet connection. In 2017, we pivoted to create Preseem, a product that empowers ISPs to proactively identify and solve network issues, while lowering support costs and improving QoE for their subscribers. Preseem includes cloud-based data, analysis and visualization, as well as hardware appliances that collect subscriber metrics and optimize the subscriber experience.

Growth To Date: Since deciding to focus on Preseem exclusively in 2017, Aterlo has grown to include over 400 deployments around the world, with the majority of our customers located in the US. Aterlo now has over 35 employees in Waterloo and the US, and we are actively hiring as we continue to expand.

What’s Next: We’re looking forward to attending the annual WISPAMERICA event for ISPs in Louisville, Kentucky in March. While there, we’ll be showing customers and prospects the latest Preseem features that empower ISPs to optimize QoE, track key trends, and deliver premium service to their subscribers. We’ll also be working on rolling out our platform for ISPs that leverage other access technologies, such as fiber. Overall, we’re excited to continue helping ISPs adopt a proactive, data-based approach to network management throughout 2023!

Ask From The Community: We’re currently looking to grow our Engineering team with both junior and senior engineers. Reach out if you’re looking for a rewarding role at a fast-growing company with a collaborative culture and competitive benefits!

34. Vetster 

Founded: 2020
Founders: Mark Bordo, CEO and Regan Johnson, CTO
Website: vetster.com

Elevator Pitch: Vetster is the world’s fastest growing veterinary telehealth platform connecting pet owners with top-rated licensed veterinary professionals. Pet owners can speak to a veterinary professional from the comfort of their own home by video or online chat – 24/7.

How it got started: Mark and Regan are serial entrepreneurs who have built world-class marketplaces. The duo built CanadaStays, Canada’s first short-term rental marketplace which was subsequently sold to Expedia. The deal was a competitive acquisition rounding out Expedia’s offering at a time when Airbnb was entering the country and the short-term rental market was heating up. Like most entrepreneurs, it wasn’t long before Mark and Regan were thinking about their next venture. Mark, who has a 14 year old cockapoo Riley with veterinary care needs, recognized a massive gap in the market. Similar to the trend of human telehealth, veterinary telehealth is a fantastic option for convenience, safe and effective care that takes the stress out of the experience. When the pandemic hit, Mark and Regan accelerated their idea and quickly built a marketplace with thousands of licensed veterinary professionals across all provinces and states in North America. At a time when consumers adopted more pets than ever before, causing the industry to balloon to $100B, veterinarians were overloaded and trying desperately to see as many animals as possible while managing COVID-19 constraints. Vetster has become a go-to resource for pet owners looking to access care.

Growth to date: Vetster closed an oversubscribed Series B raise at $30M USD in April, 2022.

That same month, the company announced an exclusive partnership with PetMeds who became the exclusive ecommerce provider of Vetster medications, while Vetster became the exclusive provider of virtual care to millions of PetMeds customers across the United States. In August of 2022, the company expanded into the UK and is now expanding into the rest of the world. In November of 2022, the company launched the Vetster for Veterinarians mobile app for Android and iOS, giving veterinarians greater flexibility to connect with pet parents any time, anywhere.

What’s next: Vetster is on a mission to become the global leader in virtual-first, data-driven pet care. We will continue to expand internationally, establish partnerships that drive deeper value for our pet parents, and continue building our world class experience to help pet parents manage their pet’s health.

Ask from the community: Vetster is hiring for roles in engineering, design, marketing and business development (https://careers.vetster.com). We’re building a progressive, inclusive global brand ideal for candidates with startup experience and a roll up your sleeves attitude.

33. Contractor Compliance

Founded: 2015
Founder: Mark Bania (CEO) & Jeremy Brown (President)
Website: www.contractorcompliance.io

Elevator Pitch: Contractor Compliance is a SaaS solution that simplifies the process for enterprise organizations to collect, manage and requalify third party requirements. Through automation, Contractor Compliance is able to reduce the administrative burden of managing this process by up to 70% within 2 weeks of partnering.

How it got started: With both founders having spent time in GRC (Governance, Risk Management & Compliance) software organizations in the past, it was becoming very clear that large enterprise organizations were increasing their focus on third party compliance management and struggling to find SaaS solutions to enable their teams to be more efficient. As supply chains are becoming more integrated & contingent workforce trends on the rise, third party compliance management is quickly becoming more critical to day-to-day operations than ever before. EHS (Environmental Health & Safety), as well as Procurement & Supply Chain teams are seeking efficiency gains to keep up with this growing workload and ensure that all third parties remain in compliance for the jobs they are hired to complete.

Growth to date: Contractor Compliance, as a fully bootstrapped organization, has seen greater than 50% ARR growth annually over our history. We’re cashflow positive and on an amazing growth trajectory. The future is bright for Contractor Compliance.

What’s next: Growth! Contractor Compliance has proven their product market fit, and are now looking to scale their model both domestically within North America & internationally.

Ask from the community: As Contractor Compliance scales, they’re looking to attract the best and brightest to their growing organization in all departments (Development, Customer Success, Customer Support, Marketing, Sales, etc.) as they prepare to pursue their first external capital raise in calendar 2023. Additionally, after receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from clients on new partnerships over the last 12 months, Contractor Compliance is looking to expand their partner network with other like-minded organizations to add incremental value to existing and future clients.

32. Wingmate 

Founded: 2018
Founders: Matt Leuschner (CEO & President) & Louis Anagnostakos (Chairman)
Website: https://wingmateapp.com/

Elevator Pitch: Does your service organization’s in-field staff miss business opportunities due to a lack of tools and resources? Wingmate is here to help. We empower service businesses to bridge the gap between operations and sales by turning their in-field staff into sales, business development, and marketing assets.

Our platform brings teams together, improves communication, and increases sales processes while allowing companies to save time and achieve their revenue goals. Don’t let a disconnect between departments hold back your service-driven business. Let Wingmate help you unite your people and reach your full potential.

How it got started: When Matthew Leuschner took the helm at Wingmate four years ago, the start-up needed help to stay afloat. But under his leadership, the company was rebranded and rebuilt, resulting in a doubling of sales year over year. Today, Wingmate boasts hundreds of clients, including major players like Purolator, Sysco, and WM.

Co-founder Louis Anagnostakos, a veteran of the waste management industry, brought his experience building a successful recycling business to the table. Together, Leuschner and Anagnostakos developed the intuitive Wingmate lead capture app and have seen their company experience significant growth and success. The name “Wingmate” is inspired by the military concept of a wingman, providing an extra set of eyes and ears to increase safety and efficiency, similar to how groups of Starlings move as one unit, and organizations should do the same.

Wingmate is taking an old-school, organic approach to growing businesses with a solid, reliable and robust foundation, which is why it is so successful in service-driven industries. The company’s success has been driven by its focus on empowering clients’ frontline drivers and field sales teams. What sets Wingmate apart as a CRM is its approach to sales and service, making it a team sport for everyone in the company. Companies are looking for ways to stand out and drive growth in today’s competitive business world. Wingmate offers a valuable solution for businesses looking to unite their teams, streamline communication, and increase revenue & efficiency. With Wingmate’s help, companies can save time, sell more, and reach their full potential.

Growth to date: Wingmate has doubled in size over the past year and tripled its staff. Despite being bootstrapped since 2018, the company has remained cash flow positive. The leadership team continues to seek top talent as Wingmate enters 2023 with plans for further growth.

What’s next: Wingmate is committed to meeting the changing needs of its customers by releasing new products and software updates. The company’s focus on continuous evolution & innovation, along with a customer-centric approach, has served it well in the past. Wingmate plans to continue that approach in the future.

As Wingmate looks to 2023, the company has ambitious growth plans. The organization plans to expand its workforce from 35 to over 100 employees while also focusing on maintaining organic revenue growth. These efforts, along with ongoing investments in product development, will allow Wingmate to serve its customers better.

This is an exciting time for Wingmate as it plans to expand its offering and services to new markets and be more flexible to meet the needs of different businesses. By providing more customer-cenrtic solutions and developing more integrations with other partners, Wingmate is well-positioned to continue to disrupt the CRM market and offer valuable solutions to businesses.

Ask from the community: Wingmate is a company that is constantly striving to grow and improve, and the key to success is a dedicated and talented team. That’s why we are always looking for new team members who are motivated and ready to make a difference. This year, we plan to increase our team size to over 100 people, which means many exciting job opportunities are on the horizon.

We also value the importance of affiliate relationships and have opportunities available, including strategic referral, reselling, and integration partnerships. If you are interested in joining our team or becoming a partner, we encourage you to reach out and learn more about the possibilities.

31. Boast.AI

Founded: Launched in 2012
Founders: Alex Popa (Founder) and Lloyed Lobo (Co-founder)
Website: Boast.ai

Elevator Pitch: Boast.ai is a fintech platform that is democratizing access to billions of dollars in R&D tax credits and innovation funding so companies can fuel their growth while preserving equity and avoiding red tape. With operations across the U.S. and Canada, more than 1,000 innovative companies have leveraged Boast.ai to get more money faster for less time and risk.

How it got started: Boast grew from the desire to upend a broken process that had existed for years—the tax credit process. Boast developed methodologies and technologies that sped up the process, and as a result, has experienced fast and steady growth and nearly 100 percent client retention rate.

Growth to date:
Boast is profitable and our revenue has grown exponentially each year
Raised $23M USD in December 2020; the company was bootstrapped until then
1,000+ customers in North America
Announced $100M USD credit facility in January 2021 to help innovative companies with their cash flow

What’s next: Boast is creating technology and partnerships to provide faster innovation through tax incentives and R&D intelligence. Innovative companies grow 260 percent faster than average companies. Boast will help companies access the billions of dollars available in R&D tax credits and funding to improve insights and grow faster. Boast software integrates financial, engineering, and project data to increase the speed, accuracy, and size of eligible tax incentives. Boast improves claim quality, compliance, and audit readiness with our experienced technical staff, and we remove the mystery, complexity, and difficulty from the process to become your R&D source of truth. The faster companies differentiate and compete through innovation, the more they win.

Ask from the community:
Let us help you recoup your product development cost
We are hiring! Visit Boast.ai career page for open positions.
Become a Boast partner and fast-track your revenue growth.
Learn from community of innovators and founders how to scale up.

30. Biiibo

Founded: 2020
Founders: Roger Sabat, Alex Sabat, Amanda Sabat
Website: www.biiibo.com

Elevator Pitch: Biiibo is an on-demand digital marketplace and platform for construction supplies that is streamlining the purchase and delivery of materials in the construction industry. Through the Biiibo app and website, homeowners and professional contractors can better manage their renovation projects, find the supplies they need, and order their materials ahead of time or on-demand within two hours. Its subscription service, Biiibo Pro, gives customers unlimited, free same day deliveries. In addition to the material marketplace, Biiibo offers builders and contractors tools to better manage their projects and their teams, enabling builders to build more efficiently.

How it got started: Biiibo was started as a spin-off of our family business wholesaling building supplies. Our team noticed that the building supply market was fractured, inefficient, and opaque. We also noticed that service levels were poor across the industry, forcing contractors to spend a lot of time procuring supplies. This led to a sub-par customer experience creating confusion and costing contractors’ tens of thousands of dollars in yearly lost productivity. Biiibo addresses this by digitizing the shopping experience and offering customers a true one-stop shop solution with flexible and on-demand delivery options. Altogether, Biiibo saves the average contractor thousands of dollars every year.

Growth to date: Since our founding in March 2020, our team has grown to more than 100 people. We’ve been fully self-funded and have expanded our operations from Toronto to Vancouver, serving thousands of customers.

What’s next: After growing rapidly in Canada, our team is preparing to expand into the US market. We’re also actively hiring for several senior positions across different departments including engineering, finance, sales and marketing.

Ask from the community: Our team is looking to hire more developers and is also interested in connecting with venture partners as we seek to raise our first round of institutional capital.

29. TestBox

Founded: 2020
Founders: Sam Senior and Peter Holland
Website: www.testbox.com

Elevator Pitch: Test and compare B2B software side-by-side for free. Explore guided walkthroughs and key use cases of top tools before you buy. No more boring demos, empty trials, and unnecessary sales calls.
How it got started: Sam saw firsthand the broken software buying process as a consultant at Bain, advising some of the largest enterprise SaaS companies in the world. TestBox puts the buyer back in the driver seat so they can have the best buying experience possible and find the right tool on their own terms.

Growth to date: Recently raised a $10M seed round.

What’s next: Building out new software categories while also selling our TestBox for Sales product.
Ask from the community: During your next software evaluation, sign up for TestBox and email hello@testbox.com for hands-on support. Today we offer CRM, Customer Support, and Marketing Automation tools.

28. Edgecom Energy 

Founded: 2016
Founder: Behdad Bahrami
Website: https://www.edgecomenergy.ca

Elevator Pitch: Edgecom Energy reduces energy costs and emissions for mid-size facilities like manufacturing plants, greenhouses, and malls using custom IoT metering and real time grid analytics.

How it got started: Behdad Bahrami was an industrial energy manager, handling over $30M+ in energy spending per year. The tools and devices used to manage his home energy which cost $100/month were more advanced and easy to use than anything commercially available for industry. This gave Behdad the spark to start Edgecom Energy.

Growth to date: Edgecom Energy serves a growing customer base of 75 large industrial and commercial clients including RBC, Cadillac Fairview (Eaton Centre), 3M Canada, and Metrolinx. We have also recently expanded into Alberta and are in the middle of a fund raise.

What’s next: Edgecom Energy’s next big step will be expanding into the US and continuing to build out our market share in Canada with our exciting new IoT product and platform.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to connect with partners, distributors and talent as well as customers in new regions and potential investors.

27. Pathcore 

Founded: 2011
Founders: Dan Hosseinzadeh and Dr. Anne Martel
Website: https://www.pathcore.com/

Elevator Pitch: Pathcore is a B2B SaaS software company that provides a platform for digital pathology. Our solutions empower scientists and pathologists to advance cancer diagnosis and treatments using the power of digital pathology; the combination of high resolution digital microscopy and AI. We merge various data sources into one easy-to-use platform, allowing people to access the data and tools they need, when they need it. We support pharma companies, biotech organizations, medical schools and hospitals in their quest to transition to digital workflows.

How it got started: In 2005 digital pathology was a new technology with the promise to change the way cancer is diagnosed and treated through high resolution imaging. At that time our co-founders were leading the adoption of this technology at Sunnybrook Research Institute with the goal of advancing cancer research, in collaboration with teams from various universities across Ontario. Our contribution was the development of a software called Sedeen Viewer that allowed researchers to integrate pathology and radiology imaging which is integral for the development of novel and non-invasive cancer biomarkers. Believing that digital pathology had the promise to greatly impact cancer diagnosis and treatment, Pathcore was spun off in 2011 as a company dedicated to the advancement of digital pathology. The Sedeen Viewer is still available as a free tool for all to access while Pathcore has continued to invest in building quality products, such as PathcoreFlow™ and PathcoreScholar™, tools that enable pathologists to transition to digital workflows and leverage the power of imaging and AI.

Growth to date: Over the past 12 years Pathcore has supported large and small organizations with their goal of adopting digital pathology. We have expanded to support organizations around the globe and expect significant demand for our products and services as the pathology industry accelerates investments in digital workflows. Despite not being venture backed, Pathcore has managed to beat the odds with a relatively small but highly capable team. We have launched five products and in just the past year we have achieved significant milestones with our PathcoreFlow™and PathcoreScholar™ products. We have continually focused on ensuring our growth would be sustainable and look forward to continuing these efforts in the future.

What’s next: 2023 promises to be one of our biggest years yet. With a robust roadmap we’re looking to double our headcount as we launch some exciting new features including new R&D initiatives and geographic expansion.

Ask from the community: With multiple new initiatives on the horizon we’re excited to expand the team significantly. Both our Engineering and our Sales and Marketing teams will be experiencing unprecedented growth and we would love to see the community be part of that. Explore all the open opportunities at pathcore.com/careers

26. Barley

Founded: 2021
Founders: Jafar Owainati and Billy Mainguy
Website: www.barley.io

Elevator Pitch: Barley is a compensation management software that helps businesses structure, analyze, and manage compensation – and keep a pulse on changing pay trends. The world of work has changed irrevocably and compensation is at heart of that change. People want to work at companies that are investing in competitive rewards, increasing transparency, and closing pay gaps. But most businesses are stuck trying to manage comp manually in spreadsheets, without the ability to see the full context, share securely, or run a pay equity analysis. Barley simplifies these complex problems. With seamless integrations and real-time analytics, Barley makes it easy for forward-thinking businesses to implement competitive and equitable pay for everyone.

How it got started: Co-founders Jafar Owainati and Billy Mainguy were drawn to the complex challenge of compensation by a shared passion for solving problems that impact people and their livelihoods every single day. They bring deep experience founding and scaling successful tech companies: Loopio and Reelhouse.

Growth to date: We spoke to hundreds of HR and Compensation leaders to uncover the most urgent challenges they are facing in these unprecedented times. Barley’s team grew quickly across two hiring hubs – Toronto and Vancouver. Ultimately, we onboarded some great companies as design partners and worked with them to build a robust suite of compensation management solutions that address the unique challenges of today.

What’s next: Barley’s compensation management software is now available to support growing organizations. We’re building fast, with new integrations launching continuously. As we grow, we’re working closely with our early customers to build high-impact features that empower them to make more informed and data-driven pay decisions every day.

Ask from the community: We want to simplify compensation for everyone – employers and employees alike – and we’re building a community around that. Give us a follow on Linkedin for resources to better understand and talk about pay.

25. Jeeves

Founded: 2019
Founders: Dileep Thazhmon (Co-founder/CEO) & Sherwin Gandhi (Co-founder/President)
Website: https://tryjeeves.com/

Elevator Pitch: Jeeves is revolutionizing business finance with borderless business banking for Startups and SMEs – globally. The Jeeves corporate credit card and expense management platform were built to empower founders, businesses, and teams of all sizes. Not only is Jeeves free to use, but the platform also offers the ability to pay back in multiple currencies while completely eliminating FX, monthly, and annual fees. With the flexibility to use both physical and virtual credit cards for your team members, you can better manage expenses on the platform that also provides significant ROI with 1-3% cashback on all spend.

How it got started: Dileep Thazhmon and Sherwin Gandhi founded Jeeves in 2019 under the premise that startups have traditionally had to rely on local and country-specific financial infrastructure. To ease this pain point, Jeeves was created as the first cross-country, cross-currency expense management platform that allows any company to spin up their finance function in minutes and get access to 30 days of credit on a true corporate card, non-card payment rails, and cross-border payments. Thousands of global companies trust Jeeves with their financial payment stack.

Growth to date: In September 2021, Jeeves raised a $57 million Series B at a $500 million valuation led by CRV, including participation from Tencent, SVB Capital, Alkeon Capital Management, Soros Fund Management, and a high-profile group of angel investors. Founders of a dozen unicorn companies also put in money in the series B including Clip CEO, Adolfo Babatz, QuintoAndar CEO, Gabriel Braga, BlockFI CEO, Zac Prince, and others. Their Series A closed in May 2021 at a valuation just north of $100 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Jeeves has raised $188 million to date to fuel its international expansion.

What’s next: In addition to its expense management platform and corporate card, the company has launched Jeeves Growth – allowing startups and SMEs to scale faster with easy to access non-dilutive capital in their local currency. Jeeves Growth, a new product that provides revenue-based financing solutions to companies across the globe, leverages the company’s infrastructure and platform to provide longer-term financing options to startups and SMEs on top of our cards and revolving credit lines. This aims to solve a significant challenge faced by global startups and SMEs.

Ask from the community: Kick-off 2022 by getting ahead. By signing up for a Jeeves card, you’ll get access to a no-fee, no-interest corporate credit card with up to 3% cashback – no strings attached. To get started and to learn more, please apply now at https://tryjeeves.com/ or reach out directly to kevin@tryjeeves.com.

24. Perch

Founded: 2018
Founder: Alex Leduc
Website: https://myperch.io/

Elevator Pitch: Perch gives personalized financial insights that help optimize a buyer’s path to homeownership. Once a homeowner, we enable them to build wealth by putting their home equity to work. All of this is made possible through highly skilled professionals and our proprietary analytics platform.

How it got started: Working in the financial sector for over 7 years, Perch founder Alex Leduc saw first-hand how broken the system was. Amongst other things, stakeholders didn’t have access to equal levels of information, clients were getting advice from the wrong “experts”, a pessimistic outlook for future home buyers where home ownership is viewed as an unachievable goal and an overreliance on home equity for retiring Canadians that have insufficient liquid assets to fund their retirement. After validating that nobody was addressing these issues holistically, Leduc set out to do it himself.

Growth to date: In 2021, Perch closed a $1M seed round and was selected to join the 2022 REACH Canada accelerator. This global scale-up program is operated by Second Century Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the National Association of Realtors®. Perch has grown from a team of three in 2020, to 15 employees in 2021. Perch was recently featured in the Toronto Star, BetaKit, TechTO and Realtor Magazine.

What’s next: With thousands of happy users to date, as well as a 174% referral rate, Perch is now focused on scaling operations and building new tools to help Canadian home buyers and homeowners.

Ask from the community: Know anyone thinking about buying a property or looking to get a mortgage pre-approval? Tell a friend to sign up for a free Perch account to start their home buying plan or share some of our online tools with them.
For homeowners, our monthly property valuation feature makes it easy to track your returns just like you might track your stock portfolio. Sign up to get started. Just curious about Perch’s mortgage rates? You can take a peek without having to create an account (but if you would like to access more in-depth insights, we highly recommend doing so!)

23. Aleria 

Lisa Russell is the Co-founder & CEO at Aleria

Founded: 2018
Founders: Lisa Russell, Arshiya Malik, Paolo Gaudiano
Website: https://www.aleria.tech/

Elevator Pitch: We measure inclusion in the workplace and pinpoint exactly where business leaders can focus to drive greater diversity, inclusion, employee satisfaction and, ultimately, greater business performance.

How it got started: In early 2018, Lisa, Arshiya and Paolo joined forces to begin commercializing some promising research activities. After establishing early customer interest, in late 2019 we developed our unique approach to measuring inclusion, and then launched our first online measurement platform in the spring of 2020.

Growth to date: Aleria has generated over $600K+ in revenue working with clients such as AstraZeneca, VMware, FINRA and more.

What’s next: In 2023, Aleria will partner with several business leaders and trade organizations to publish industry-specific inclusion benchmarks. We look forward to further leveraging our data and insights to help folks better understand how they can drive quantifiable change.

Ask from the community: Do you have experience working in enterprise or B2B startup sales? Are you also passionate about social impact or building equitable workplaces? We’re actively looking to expand our sales and client success teams and would love to hear from you.

22. Rhenti

Founded: 2019
Founders: Tomas Ronis, Erin Chan, Julio Fujimaki, Kyle Boutros
Website: https://rhenti.com/

Elevator Pitch: Losing good renter leads can hurt the performance of your rental portfolio. Attract and sign more high-quality applicants with Rhenti’s industry-leading marketing automation and leasing software for professionals. More renters. Fast leases. Less work.

How it got started Back when we explored this problem space, we didn’t like the system that was set up for connecting property owners with renters. There actually wasn’t a system at all – it was a disjointed process that people cobbled together haphazardly. And when we examined it further, there was so much time, effort, and frustration involved for both the renter and property owner. There wasn’t a solution that was tackling this problem in the right way, and we knew that we could build a better system.

Growth to date: Last year (2022) was an interesting year for many tech start-ups – as it was for us. With the turbulence in both the Canadian real estate market and the tech industry, we put our heads down and further sharpened our focus to achieve our best quarter to date in Q4. With 1,800 clients managing over 60k doors along with new partnerships, Rhenti is moving into 2023 with strong momentum.

What’s next: This year will be a true test to our business model and a formative year for Rhenti. We will have the opportunity to prove that the Rhenti experience is the industry’s leading lead-to-lease software platform for rental real estate professionals and renters searching for their next home. We have a few exciting partnerships to announce in Q1 that will change the trajectory of our business. We will also achieve profitability within the year, which is a milestone that we are very excited for.

21. Shinydocs

Founded: 2013
Founder: Jason W. D. Cassidy
Website: https://shinydocs.com/

Elevator Pitch: Shinydocs automates the process of finding and identifying all files, media content, and documents buried in storage locations across an organization, which enables more informed decisions that drive growth and deliver positive customer experiences. We believe that there’s a better, more intuitive, and cost-effective way for organizations to manage their information. This belief has propelled us forward in the development of our software, services, and strategy and allows us to support organizations such as AgNovos Healthcare and Dunedin City Council in their pursuit of improving their customer experience, collaboration, innovation, and ability to demonstrate compliance with industry regulations through easier and more effective management of their business content.

How it got started: Shinydocs CEO Jason Cassidy has been solving digital enterprise technology challenges for over 20 years. He founded Shinydocs with the belief that there is a better way for organizations to manage their data. Together with our other founders, David Yoon and Khalid Merhi, Jason incorporated Shinydocs in 2013 and the company has been growing exponentially ever since.

Growth to date:
We doubled our Sales and Marketing team and we continue to grow the revenue side of our business with many open roles on both teams.
Headcount grew 40% last year.
We moved into a new and really cool brick and beam office in Downtown Kitchener with Kombucha on tap 😉

What’s next: Launched a new program designed to deliver customer value quickly for a small investment called the Content Landscape Assessment. The Content Landscape Assessment provides a customer with two tangible outcomes: 1) a content landscape inventory – which is the first step in any unstructured data project. The customer gets a complete inventory of what files, documents, and records they have and where they are located in a matter of days (not many months). With this, the customer can make a more informed decision about how to put more of their unstructured data under management; 2) we apply Shinydocs on a subset of their data to do things like find sensitive data that is stored where it shouldn’t be stored, identify duplicate files and/or files with no business value, or enable a federated content search experience.

Ask from the community: Shinydocs is currently looking to hire a number of roles across the business  – and are always interested in talented folks. Join our growing team today by visiting our website: https://shinydocs.com/careers.

20. Synctera

Founded: 2020
Founders: CEO Peter Hazlehurst, CTO Kris Hansen , CPO Dominik Weisserth
Website: https://synctera.com/

Elevator Pitch: Synctera is powering the future of FinTech for companies that want to create new revenue streams and enhance their value proposition by offering FinTech apps and embedded banking products. With APIs, compliance support, and bank partners in one end-to-end Banking as a Service platform, Synctera is the fastest and easiest way to build, launch, and scale bank accounts, debit cards, charge cards, lending, and more.

How Synctera got started: Synctera was founded to solve a common pain point between FinTechs and Banks. The FinTech-Bank partnership model was broken; connecting FinTechs and Banks was an extremely manual and burdensome process for both parties. Our three co-founders have firsthand experience with pain points and difficulties managing FinTech-Bank partnerships. Together, they worked to solve this problem for both sides of the ecosystem and created Synctera, which enables FinTechs and Banks to partner quickly and grow together. This provides Banks with additional revenue streams and FinTechs with the ability to build and launch their financial products in a matter of weeks.

Synctera Growth to date: Since forming in December 2020, Synctera has launched new products and features at a steady pace, built industry-leading risk & compliance capabilities and a best-in-class developer experience, formed partnerships with a diverse range of sponsor banks, and launched many FinTech clients into production. Synctera now has over 100 employees across the United States and Canada.

What’s next:
In 2023, Synctera will be:
Adding support for additional credit and lending use cases
Adding support for international markets and cross-border use cases
Continuing to refine the Synctera Console to help FinTechs and sponsor banks manage risk, compliance, and operations together
Adding more sponsor banks to our platform so that FinTechs and Banks can find compatible partners
Expanding our professional services team so that FinTechs can build even more efficiently

Ask from the community: Synctera is hiring for a bunch of roles, here. If you are looking to launch a FinTech app or embedded banking product get in touch with our team of experts to see how Synctera can help.

19. Adaptive Pulse

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jennifer Huynh, Johnson Phanyaseng
Website: https://adaptivepulse.com/

Elevator Pitch: Adaptive Pulse predicts and identifies at-risk and expansion customers for B2B SaaS companies. We analyze customer behavior and produces recommendations and insights to for teams to immediately prioritize retention efforts, reduce churn and increase revenues. Using advances in NLP and predictive analytics, we analyze internal and external data sources including structured and unstructured data to provide a unified view of the customer, which segments are the most at-risk, likely to expand, and recommend how to successfully convert them.
How it got started: Jennifer discovered this problem first hand at the B2B SaaS company that she was previously working with when trying to understand and increase customer retention while Johnson built similar internal tools for the retention team at the company that he was previously working at.

Growth to date: Adaptive Pulse has grown from just the 2 founders bootstrapping for 14 months to an amazing team of 15 and growing after oversubscribing their pre-seed round. They are serving both U.S. and Canadian companies, from growth stage to public organizations, and are continuing to grow. Adaptive Pulse has taken part in many great programs including CDL, Intuit and Highline Beta, NextAI, FIRE, and FoundersBoost accelerators.

What’s next: Adaptive Pulse aims to help businesses better understand and proactively retain their customers by helping keep a Pulse on every customer with their proprietary AI models. This goes beyond gaining visibility into the whole customer journey, to prioritize which customers need to be focused on but also helping businesses objectively plan product roadmaps and staying on top of industry and competitive trends. Armed with this data and insights, we are becoming the go to intelligence layer sitting on top of customer and market data.

Ask from the community: Adaptive Pulse will be looking to raise their seed round in the near future with commitments interest from some prominent seed funds, but introductions to B2B SaaS obsessed funds would be appreciated. Introductions to Customer Success professionals to join Communitech’s P2P group would also be appreciated as we are always looking to connect people in the industry to share insights and experiences.

18. Agilicus

Founded: 2018
Founders: Don Bowman, Angelo Compagnoni
Website: https://www.agilicus.com/

Elevator Pitch: Agilicus is transforming the way modern workforces connect to corporate resources whether information systems or operational technology. With a foundation in Zero Trust, Agilicus is a more secure alternative to VPNs and traditional remote connectivity solutions. Our cloud-native platform is helping organizations of all types and sizes expand the reach of company resources without compromising security. Mobile users, frontline workers, contractors, vendors, and partners can all be equipped with secure access that was previously unattainable. With Agilicus, any organization can provide single sign-on, using existing credentials, to any resource, using any device, without a VPN or client; simply, securely, and economically.

How it got started: After the global success of Sandvine Incorporated which was acquired in 2017, former co-Founder/CTO Don Bowman set out to combine his passion for cyber security with cloud native technology to make remote access easier, more secure and affordable. The idea and concept was tested and developed in an operational setting with 1000s of users.

Growth to date: Agilicus developed the platform with strategic customers through paid trials. These customers needed to provide secure remote access to hundreds of frontline line workers to corporate applications. Those organizations are now customers. With their support, feedback, and a proven need for an affordable, easy to deploy cybersecurity platform, Agilicus is acting on its vision of a safer internet and adding new clients. In 2021, through our initial success, Agilicus was proud to introduce it’s platform and bring on institutional investors. Today, Agilicus is being used to enable secure remote access to operational technology and critical systems, including water treatment facilities and critical infrastructure.

What’s next: We are resolute in our mission to deliver secure remote access to organizations of all sizes, helping to make the internet a safe place to do business. In 2023, our focus will be on product expansion, helping new clients and customers improve their cyber resilience. We’ll be working to continue developing our use cases protecting critical infrastructure for both operational technology as well as information systems. We’ll also continue to grow our team as we grow Agilicus into a global cybersecurity company.

Ask from the community: Accessibility to cyber security has never been more important. Our team is excited to find partner organizations who share our vision of making a safer internet for people and businesses and can help make that happen. We are also always on the lookout for talented individuals ready to help make a difference in the way people are accessing the internet. As we expand we will be looking for developers, sales, and marketing professionals.

17. Goosechase 

Founded: 2011
Founder: Andrew Cross
Website: https://www.goosechase.com/

Elevator Pitch: Inspired by scavenger hunts, Goosechase is an online platform that enables people to create exceptional experiences for their communities. From teachers aiming to boost learning in the classroom all the way to Fortune 500 organizations using Goosechase to run their employee onboarding, the use cases really are endless. If your goal is to activate, engage, or educate a group, in a delightful, meaningful way, Goosechase is the easy (and fun!) solution for you.
How it got started: Goosechase was “hatched” at a Hackathon at the University of Waterloo. Like most good ideas, it had legs (wings!) of its own, and we instantly saw demand for the platform. We knew this was going to be interesting when we saw people completing missions like jumping into pools fully clothed, shaving company logos onto their heads…all for a Goosechase (and maybe good karma and bragging rights). We knew we had tapped into something exciting and engaging, and so we built the platform to keep up with that power!

How it got started: GooseChase was “hatched” at a Hackathon at the University of Waterloo. Like most good ideas, it had legs (wings!) of its own, and we instantly saw demand for the platform. We knew this was going to be interesting when we saw people completing missions like jumping into pools fully clothed, shaving company logos onto their heads…all for a GooseChase (and maybe good karma and bragging rights). We knew we had tapped into something exciting and engaging, and so we built the platform to keep up with that power!

Growth to date: To date, millions of app users have participated in more than 630,000 Goosechase experiences.

What’s next: Our team has grown by over 200% in the past two years. With the right people in place, we’re poised for more innovation and more success than ever! Without sharing too much, here’s what we’re busy hatching…
Last year, we did something big. Thanks to over a decade of our customers pushing the boundaries of our platform, we relaunched as the world’s first (and best) interactive experience platform (scavenger hunts still among those many experiences, of course!). Time and again, we’ve seen customers use Goosechase in ways we never could’ve imagined. We thought we would facilitate scavenger hunts and games, when in reality we’re used on the daily for onboarding, training, fundraising, learning, tourism, and in a million other ways to make everyday tasks more exciting. Our aim for the next year is to show exactly how flexible Goosechase is and how it can help hit your goals. Connecting communities is at the heart of everything we do. We’ll be rolling out initiatives to bring that to life.

Ask from the community: Keep up with us on the blog, where we’re committed to bringing you valuable tips for engaging any kind of community. Worst case scenario? You’ll get a few great jokes. https://blog.goosechase.com/

16. Mappedin

Founded: 2011
Founder: Hongwei Liu
Website: https://www.mappedin.com/

Elevator Pitch: Headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Mappedin is the leading platform for indoor spatial data management, digitizing venues, and building best-in-class indoor mapping and wayfinding experiences. Built for scale, Mappedin’s flexible platform and enterprise-grade tools enable them to work with leading operators, developers and integrators around the world. Mappedin has set out to digitize all indoor spaces, regardless of vertical, enabling their customers to leverage maps for a variety of use cases and experiences.

How it got started: As an electrical engineering student at the University of Waterloo, Hongwei Liu had just come off a work term with Research in Motion, when he applied to live at the University’s Velocity Incubator residence. While there, the idea for Mappedin was conceived as something to help other students find their way around campus.

Mappedin signed up two malls, the university, and a casino as their first four customers. Along the way, they hired their first paid staff and Liu decided to postpone his engineering studies and work on the business full-time.

Soon after, Liu realized the most valuable problem Mappedin was solving was helping customers — such as property managers from Cadillac Fairview or Ivanhoe Cambridge — manage their entire portfolio of indoor maps with centralized, user-friendly tools. Or, as Mappedin likes to call it, a word processor for maps – something anyone can use. Mappedin’s powerful Map Editor enables those property managers to manage their location data in one place instead of scribbling changes on eight different pieces of paper.

Growth to date: In 2021 alone, Mappedin more than doubled its customer count, most of that growth coming from non-retail verticals and platform integrations. To date, Mappedin is used across more than 1300 venues in more than 54 countries and is one of the largest providers of indoor maps in the world. This amounts to more than 1.3 billion square feet of indoor space being powered by Mappedin’s products.

What’s next: Chances are that the last mall you went to, anywhere in the world, is a Mappedin customer. Now a growing number of airports, hospitals, stadiums, and Fortune 500 offices are Mappedin customers too. Every month, Mappedin helps millions of people around the world find stores, gates, seats, coworkers, empty desks, and other points of interest. Mappedin tools are used daily by office managers, marketing coordinators, facility managers, leasing reps, and fire prevention officers to maintain a single source of truth – one map everywhere. Heading into 2023, Mappedin is focused on the next generation of mapping tools, adding strategic partners for growth and scalability, and developing solutions that resonate with key verticals to increase visitor experiences.

Ask from the community: Mappedin has lofty goals for 2023 and in order to attain them, growing the team and hiring is a top priority! Mappedin has open roles across many teams including engineering, product, marketing, sales, finance, partnerships, customer success, and customer support. Feel free to visit the Mappedin careers page for all current open roles at mappedin.com/careers. Follow Mappedin on Linkedin at linkedin.com/company/mappedin and don’t forget to subscribe to Mappedin Minute, a monthly newsletter to round up interesting resources, updates, and news about indoor maps in just about a minute.

15. 1Mentor

Founded: 2020
Founders: Esteban Veintimilla, Martin Serrano, Diego Robles
Website: https://www.1mentor.io/

Elevator Pitch: Technology is disrupting society, creating a fast-paced, ever-changing world. As a result, preparing students with the right skills, tools, and knowledge is even more challenging each year. 1Mentor is an AI-powered platform that enables higher education and students to understand how the labour market is evolving and to receive personalized recommendations to prepare for the future of work.

How it got started: 1Mentor is the solution to a problem that the founders faced as students: the disconnect between their skills and those employers looked for. Esteban then acquired three years of professional experience, placing students into their first work experience, hiring over 300 students and placing them in over 100 companies. There, he was able to see both sides: what skills employers looked for in candidates and what students offered the labour market. That’s where the idea of 1Mentor took shape. It started by manually analyzing the skills gaps and then preparing students with the lacking skills to perform at the workplace. Then, they integrated AI to make it scalable and personalized for each student. 1Mentor has spoken with dozens of colleges and universities and hundreds of students who have identified this problem and supported its vision.

Growth to date: Working with the University of Waterloo, University of Alberta, Purdue University, and Arizona State University, amongst others, has taught 1Mentor the lessons to be ready to scale their impact. Our current metrics are strong, for instance showing that 90% of students believing that 1Mentor would improve their employability outcomes and achieve their career objectives. Now, strong interest for 1Mentor’s solution has come from Latin America and the UK, markets that the company is evaluating to expand.

What’s next: The main highlight is the universities 1Mentor is working with. The people in these institutions are innovators and forward-thinking about evolving how students understand how the labour market is evolving and acquire the skills to prepare for the future of work. These universities are thrilled about 1Mentor’s vision and have contributed with vital recommendations so that our relationships become more of a partnership and so that we build the product that they need.

Ask from the community: Feel free to reach out to us directly at info at 1mentor.io. We are constantly looking to connect with experts, educators, students, investors, and other founders, to share insights, explore possibilities, and to keep growing.

14. Flywheel

Founded: 2018
Founder: Chris Sell, David Joosten, Tameem Iftikhar
Website: https://flywheelsoftware.com

Elevator Pitch: Flywheel is the leading no-code customer segmentation platform. Flywheel allows marketers to build customer segments on customer data within the Cloud Data Warehouse and use them within any marketing, sales, or customer service tool–no SQL required.

How it got started: David and Chris met while working at Google in 2011. They were responsible for running marketing campaigns for millions of Google’s small business customers. The major challenge was activating customer data sitting in the data warehouse to send messages through email, SMS, push notifications, and other channels. Chris and David realized that while Data Warehouses had great business intelligence tools for data visualization like Tableau, PowerBI, and Looker, there were no great tools for data activation. They started Flywheel as a simple way for business users to build first-party customer segments directly from their data warehouse to any marketing, sales, or customer service channel in minutes.

Growth to date: Flywheel is backed by The Jordan Company & works with top enterprise clients like Google, Indeed, NASCAR, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and others. We have grown revenue and headcount 10x since 2018. Several key trends are coming together to support Flywheel’s growth: 1) Companies are moving their data to modern data stacks and the Cloud at an increasing pace 2) Privacy and security regulations and positions by Apple and Google are making companies focus on how they get smarter with using their first-party data for growth.

What’s next:
Flywheel’s vision is to activate customer data sitting in any data store with a No Code interface
in minutes. We are working on several important initiatives to support this vision:
1) Deploy in any Cloud Platform (AWS, GCP, Azure)
2) Ability to query any data store (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Synapse)
3) Creating an Audience Marketplace that will generate intelligent 1st party audiences (ie. high
LTV customers) automatically for companies we work with.
The level of DevOps, Data Engineering, and ML challenges we are tackling are formidable and
exciting.

Ask from the community: We’re hiring for several key roles across our Engineering and Sales teams. If you’re interested, please reach out to tameem at flywheelsoftware.com. If you are a data consulting company working with clients on their data warehouse, we would love to chat about potential partnership opportunities as well.

13. Railz

From the left Sohaib Zahid (CEO) and Derek Manuge (CTO)

Founded: 2020
Founder: Sohaib Zahid (CEO) and Derek Manuge (CTO)
Website: https://www.railz.ai/

Elevator Pitch: Railz is building the largest financial data network to support the future of finance. The Railz Accounting Data-as-a-Service™ API enables innovators to build the next generation of data-powered financial services. Integrate with top accounting service providers through our API and access normalized financial data on your small- and medium-sized business customers.

How it got started: Railz’s two co-founders, Sohaib Zahid and Derek Manuge, realized that the slow approval processes were a result of limited access to quality financial data on their small- and medium-sized businesses to enable decision-making. Getting access to granular, high quality, and clean financial data on businesses has been a problem for all financial institutions — whether it’s lenders, banks, fintechs, governments, and other financial service providers. Derek’s past experience in quant led him to realize the problem of accessing quality data to build better models. He found himself spending more than half of his time trying to access these data points. Sohaib realized that while small- and medium-sized business (SMB) accounting data was accessible from cloud accounting packages, these datasets weren’t available in a standardized format. It is virtually impossible to manually standardize these datasets into a useful format. He also knew the challenges that SMBs have in getting access to business loans — the process is painstakingly long! Normalized data was the key to success.

Growth to date: To date, Railz has raised $15M, with $12M in Series A in May 2021. Our team has grown from 5 to 56 in just 2 year’s time and we are continuing to scale our customers, partners, and integrations, as well.

What’s next: At Railz, we are constantly working to improve and evolve our platform to meet the changing needs of our users. From new banking partnerships to cutting-edge financial products, we are always striving to democratize access to better financial services for SMEs.

Ask from the community: Stay up to date on the latest happenings at Railz! From our involvement in the Mastercard Start Path program to our partnership expansions and our focus on serving SMEs, there’s always something new and exciting happening. Follow us on social media, sign up for our newsletter, and check out our monthly blog to stay in the loop!

12. CruxOCM

Founded: 2017
Founder: Vicki Knott and Roger Shirt
Website: https://www.cruxocm.com/

Elevator Pitch: Just as planes have autopilot to assist—but not replace—pilots, CruxOCM enables the autonomous control rooms of tomorrow, working alongside control room operators within the safety constraints of today. CruxOCM’s revolutionary technology leverages machine learning and advanced physics-based methodologies to uncover unforeseen efficiencies in heavy industrial control rooms such as energy, utilities, renewables and beyond to maximize ROI, without ever compromising safety.

How it got started: CruxOCM was born from the belief that control room operators should be given the best tools available to perform their jobs safely and efficiently, while at the same time minimizing environmental impact and maximizing bottom-line revenue for operating companies while leveraging their existing equipment. Our founder’s thought, if pilots have autopilot software, why don’t control room operators? Inspired by the challenges our founders experienced working in major control rooms and in process control, CruxOCM’s founders Vicki and Roger set out to build the tools needed to operate major industrial assets more effectively from the heart and soul of the operation, the control room.

Growth to date: CruxOCM has raised $7.6 million CAD ($6 million USD) to fuel its product development and expansion efforts.

What’s next: CruxOCM has proven a strong product market fit over the last three years and is on track to provide more control room operators with the best tools available to perform their jobs safely and efficiently. Our company’s software is also instrumental in helping companies to minimize environmental impact and maximize bottom-line revenue via increased asset utilization and throughput. CruxOCM will also plans to use current capital to bolster installations so that it can expand across client asset bases faster and begin pursuing additional product lines into gas plants, gas pipelines and offshore facilities.

Ask from the community: We are hiring for multiple positions. Check out https://www.cruxocm.com/careers to learn more.

11. Chocolate Soup 

Founded: 2016
Founders: Pj Lowe, Dan Silivestru, Megan Hall
Website: https://www.chocolatesoup.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Chocolate Soup is here to help leaders build happy, caring, and respectful teams through the power of radical generosity, surprise, and delight. We’ve found that recognizing important employee personal and professional milestones with personal, curated gifts strengthens existing bonds and creates new ones within teams and across organizations. Chocolate Soup offers subscription-based employee recognition plans and remote-team gift boxes that can be customized for your culture and team.

How it got started: Celebrating milestones to show recognition is something that runs deep in our DNA. Pj built recognition into our culture throughout our past startup journeys, striving to recognize our team for more than just work milestones. We recognized those events that we knew were important to them – their birthdays, their significant others’ birthdays, children’s birthdays, anniversaries, and more. When we made the hard decision to wind our last startup down, it was vital for us to make sure we could create soft landings for our employees by helping them find new roles. We brought the team together to give them the news and offered to connect them with hiring companies. Their reaction shocked us to our cores. Instead of jumping ship right away, all of our team insisted on staying to help automate their current jobs as much as possible to allow us founders to give it one last go. Later on, we asked our former teammates why they made that choice – and the answers were all the same. Our employees felt connected with the business, us, and each other. It was a community, and they were in it until the end. As Pj and I looked for our next challenge, we kept coming back to the same thing. It wasn’t some employee engagement software tool that made that happen. It was simple, personalized recognition. We knew this was something other businesses could use – a way for them to recognize their employees the way that we have without all the heavy lifting.

Growth to date: We’ve grown over the last three years and more companies embrace remote and hybrid work. With the recent layoffs across the tech industry, we believe that now is more important than ever to double down on recognition to help your employees through these challenging times.

What’s next: We’re launching our HRIS integrations and self-service portal this year. We’ve also launched new sales and customer success gifting programs to expand our offerings.

Ask from the community: If you’ve got questions about improving or enhancing your employee experience programs, we’re here to help.

10. Kinderdrop

Founded: 2020
Founders: Agnes Lan
Website: https://www.kinderdrop.com/

Elevator Pitch: Kinderdrop is a marketplace platform that connects parents with short term child care needs to licensed daycares with short term availiability. We strive to be the trusted source of information for making informed childcare decisions.

How it got started: Kinderdrop was founded by Agnes in 2020, after she faced her own childcare predicament. When both grandparents were unavailable to help out, she called a nearby licensed childcare centre – there just isn’t such service around. For the daycare, the administrative details to take in short term placement just isn’t worth it. Agnes realised other parents must be having the same issues and that’s how Kinderdrop came to be. Fast forward a few years and voila, you can now enjoy a reliable and professional occupancy booking system for parents to find short-term services at licenced childcare centre.

Growth to date: The pandemic gave us plenty of time to refine Kinderdrop’s features. As of Fall 2022, Kinderdrop is now available in App Store and Google Play with a pilot in the York Region. The play is to be servicing the whole of GTA by the end of 2023.

What’s next: We are excited to have the pilot under our belt and looking for a second launch location.

Ask from the community: We are looking for community connections. Do you know other communities we are able to help? Connect us.

9. Ecopia AI

From the left: Shuo Tan, VP of Engineering and Co-Founder; Mike Shu, CEO and Co-Founder; Jon Lipinski, President and Co-Founder

Founded: 2013
Founders: Mike Shu, Jon Lipinski, and Shuo Tan
Website: ecopia.ai

Elevator Pitch: Ecopia AI (Ecopia) is creating a digital twin of the Earth using AI-based mapping systems, providing foundational information for critical decision-making and improving the welfare of societies, efficiency of economies, and health of environments. We develop the most accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date maps to help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges, at a fraction of the time and cost required by traditional mapping methods.

How it got started: Our core technology was developed through PhD research at the University of Waterloo, a globally-recognized leader in computer engineering. The technology was spun out of the university to empower commercial organizations, governments, and nonprofits alike with AI-based mapping, and Ecopia was founded.

Growth to date: To date, Ecopia has mapped over 40 million square kilometers in unprecedented detail across more than 100 countries around the world. Ecopia works with hundreds of municipalities, federal governments, commercial organizations, and nonprofits, empowering them to make map-based decisions faster and cheaper without sacrificing quality and accuracy. Our partner network includes 30+ leading geospatial imagery and technology companies who work with us to empower our end users with accurate, complete, and current information in a changing world. Example customers and partners include NOAA, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The World Bank, SwissRe, City of Los Angeles, Airbus, CoreLogic, and the Canadian Federal Government.

What’s next: Ecopia is building a digital twin of the world layer by layer. Now that we have built a true foundational layer for this digital twin, we are continuing to innovate with AI to provide further contextual layers of information for decision-makers to leverage as a source of truth. Ecopia is exploring ways to apply our AI-based mapping systems to applications in augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, indoor mapping, and other cutting-edge technology.

Ask for the community: If you or any organizations you know/work with have a need for geospatial data and mapping, get in touch. We’re always happy to grow our network and enable companies with the data they need for decision-making. Similarly, if you know of top talent looking to make a real impact on the world with AI, send them our way.

8. Scoop Solar

From the left Babak Sardary, Co-Founder & CEO, Mojgan Givi, Co-Founder & CTO

Founded: 2016
Founders: Babak Sardary Co-Founder & CEO, Mojgan Givi Co-Founder & CTO
Website: https://www.scoop.solar/

Elevator pitch: As solar and renewables infrastructure become widespread, Scoop Solar’s software enables growth for installers and service providers by mobilizing their operations, eliminating inefficiencies, and allowing them to scale faster than climate change.

How it got started: Scoop was started because of firsthand experience facing the challenges of running distributed and remote field operations. Scoop’s founders realized that companies involved in renewable infrastructure lacked the tools to connect their teams and empower leaders to put creative ideas into action. Therefore, they decided to take a fresh new approach to architecting a solution. The Scoop® product suite uniquely allows green energy teams to modularize complex projects into ‘scoops’ that can be easily executed by remote, internal, or partner teams while progress and data feed up to the organization. Ultimately, this approach improves collaboration and transparency, and more easily allows renewable energy businesses to scale their operations.

Growth to date: Scoop Solar has been doubling both revenues and customer counts for the past four years!

What’s next: We’ve achieved profitability and have our eyes set on strategic growth opportunities, both in new geographies and new renewable energy markets such as HVAC systems, wind energy, and heat pumps.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to connect with partners and supporters to introduce our game-changing technology to a larger audience and amplify the impact. If you have a passion for climate change and an interest in working for a fast-paced technology company in the renewables sector, we’d love to hear from you! Check out our open roles here.

7. Uvaro 

Founded: 2019
Founder: Joseph Fung, Donna Litt and Derek Hall
Website: https://uvaro.com/

Elevator Pitch: We started Uvaro because the old approach to tech hiring is broken. The fastest-growing segment of our economy needs 250,000 new sales professionals and colleges and universities aren’t training them fast enough. Worse yet, programs offered by traditional education institutions take so long to develop that by the time you get into the workforce what you were taught is often obsolete. Which is why we’ve developed our programs with instructors who have hands-on experience in the field. We pair this training with a powerful network of technology companies, 1:1 career coaching, and automated job search systems. The results speak for themselves — our grads launch new careers within 3 weeks, they double their previous income, and they achieve 150% their onboarding sales targets at their new employers.

How it got started: Formed by our three co-founders, Joseph Fung, Donna Litt, and Derek Hall, they saw that traditional education institutions could not properly teach and train tech-sales effectively because the program lengths and development time often meant that what was taught in class was obsolete by the time the student graduated. It was through combining the three pillars of career success, in-class learning, technological solutions designed to ease learning, and peer-to-peer and mentor networking, that we could accelerate training while at the same time not make any sacrifices to program content.

Growth to date: Since our beginnings we have brought career success to hundreds of individuals across North America. Our students are able to land roles in their new careers within 6 weeks of graduating, and our last cohort was 60% hired before finishing their program! Because of our Members’ career success, we have been able to offer our second program; a 4-week accelerator course, and are graduating more students than ever.

What’s next: Rapidly growing and hiring!

Ask from the community: We’re hiring rapidly and are looking for talented individuals to fulfill a variety of roles. Go to our About page (www.uvaro.com/about) to find the latest job openings.

6. MedMe Health 

Founded: 2019
Founder: Purya Sarmadi (Chief Executive Officer), Rui Su (Chief Operating Officer), Nicholas Hui (Chief Product Officer)
Website: www.medmehealth.com

Elevator Pitch: MedMe is building the operating system for the pharmacies of the future, powering their transformation from dispensaries to community healthcare hubs.

How it got started: Purya, a health data scientist and Nick, a product engineer at Tesla, met through the Next 36. They’d watched their own parents managing multiple medications for chronic illnesses and rely on their pharmacists for care. With the rise of online pharmacies and automated dispensing, they identified the need for pharmacists, the most accessible yet underutilized healthcare professional, to shift beyond the traditional retail model to providing more healthcare services for patients in their communities. Driven by the prospect of this transformational healthcare opportunity, they were introduced to Rui, a pharmacist who had experienced first-hand the barriers to delivering clinical services in the community pharmacy setting. Together, they set out to transform and enable the future of pharmacy practice through technology.

Growth to date: Over 3500 community pharmacies are using the MedMe platform. The platform has powered over ~20M patient services, including playing a critical role across the country throughout the pandemic, MedMe has raised over $3.7M USD to date including from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), MaRS IAF, and Y-Combinator.

What’s next: MedMe is building on their rapid growth and role throughout the pandemic to take their modular platform to the next level; providing community pharmacies of all sizes and geographies the transformative technology to service high-quality care experiences and accessible healthcare offerings to their patients.

Ask from the community: MedMe is growing fast and if you or anybody you know looking to transform healthcare for communities across the country (and beyond) reach out for roles in engineering and customer success here.

5. Bidmii 

Founded: 2020
Founders: Jon Christensen(CEO), Phillip Stack (CTO), James Christensen(COO)
Website: bidmii.com

Elevator Pitch: If you’ve ever struggled to find a contractor you can trust, you’re not alone. The technology used to help find and screen contractors for home improvement projects is no more sophisticated than using classified ads. The current system is deeply flawed and homeowners routinely experience the theft of deposits. It’s not any better for contractors. With the average invoice taking over two months to be paid, it’s no wonder that 80% of contractors spend a large portion of their week chasing payments on past projects. The result of this inefficiency and lack of trust is a ‘shortage’ of skilled trades.

The home improvement industry is ripe for disruption and at the core of this change lies one simple, yet powerful tool: trust. By leveraging technology to increase trust between homeowners and contractors, we create an efficient, safe, and reliable system that is revolutionizing the home improvement industry. Bidmii is an online marketplace for residential renovations that holds payments in trust while projects are being completed. Payments are released once the project (or stage, if it’s a larger project) is completed. For homeowners, we’ve eliminated stolen deposits, while reducing contractor accounts receivables by 98%.

How it got started: Bidmii was founded by a team of construction and tech professionals who have over a decade of experience in the industry. We saw firsthand how hard it was to find reliable contractors, or even just find good information that wasn’t biased or paid for. We knew there had to be an easier way, so we set out to create Bidmii: a modern platform for connecting homeowners with high-quality contractors.

Today, our platform puts trust first and is revolutionizing the industry one project at a time. We’ve enabled thousands of homeowners across Canada (and some commercial clients too) to get multiple bids from multiple contractors faster than ever before – and we’re just getting started!

Growth to date: Since launching to the public in January 2021, we’ve seen tremendous success, averaging 25% m/m growth across several key KPIs. We now have 6,000+ users and 2,500+ projects posted to date. We’ve enabled homeowners to complete a wide variety of projects including kitchen renovations, bathroom updates, commercial renovations, and even a custom home build. Our projects have ranged in price from $58 to over $60,000. Right now, there are a few projects on the platform that will end up being hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We’re excited to see Bidmii continue to grow and play an even bigger role in the home improvement industry. Late in 2022, Bidmii was awarded 3rd place for Innovative Product of the Year by the Canadian Construction Association. Our team is passionate about making it easy for people to get their projects done on time and on budget—while keeping trust front and center. We believe that with our help, this industry will become better than ever before!

What’s next: A few weeks ago, we announced the launch of Bidmii Finance (https://bidmii.com/m/blog-posts/bidmii-finance) which provides up to $10M in loans to contractors, further enabling them to speed the growth of their company. We also recently launched our first artificial intelligence integrations, which allow contractors to build better profiles and more cohesive bids at lightning speed. This upgrade enhances the experience for both contractors and homeowners on the platform, and shortens the overall time-to-trust.

As we continue to expand our reach across Canada, Bidmii will remain laser-focused on creating a safe and efficient home improvement system. We’re committed to continuing our mission of revolutionizing the home improvement industry so that everyone can benefit from secure and cost-effective projects, no matter the size. With our dedication to trust, transparency, and value—we’re changing the game for homeowners and contractors everywhere.

Stay tuned, as we continue to launch new features and products:
Contractor Indexing/Search
Robust Update for the Quoting Tool for Contractors
Buy now, pay later for Homeowners
Embedded Insurance

Ask from the community: If you want to join Bidmii’s mission of revolutionising the home improvement industry, contact us today! We’d love to hear from you – especially if you’re pitching a channel partnership that will help us spread the good word. We also launched a crowdfunding campaign with Frontfundr that is nearly fully subscribed. If you want to join us, you can find that here: https://www.frontfundr.com/bidmii

Together, we can make a difference for generations to come. Thank you for being a part of our amazing journey! We look forward to hearing from you and working together to make the home improvement industry better than ever before! Thank you for being a part of our mission.

4. Wagepoint

Founded: 2012
Founder: Shrad Rao
Website: www.wagepoint.com

Elevator Pitch: Wagepoint is a small-but-mighty fintech company on a mission to simplify payroll – and maybe even dare to make it delightful! Their online software was created just for small businesses, automating the most “ugh” parts of payroll – like calculating wages and reporting on taxes – so that their customers can get back to doing, well, literally anything else. Backed by the world’s friendliest team, Wagepoint is always supportive, never stuffy and refreshingly human. Founded in 2012, they make payroll magic happen for more than 23,000 small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers across North America.

How it got started: Paying people is a tedious but essential part of running a business and, let’s be honest – nobody starts a small business so that they can do payroll! Online payroll software makes life easier, but the challenge with most small business payroll software is that it has simply been trimmed down from an x-large enterprise version to small or x-small with less than flattering or functional results. At Wagepoint, we’ve turned this story around and given it a better ending by creating small business software cut from a different cloth. Instead of resizing existing designs, we’ve tailored a solution that’s built just for small businesses with the human factor woven deep into the fabric. This is how we’ve become simple payroll software, created just for small businesses and backed by the world’s friendliest team. Now, we can all live happily ever after.

Growth to date: 
2022 was an exciting (and fun!) year for Wagepoint! Not only did it mark the company’s 10th “birthday” (cue the confetti), but it also saw its first two acquisitions – Timesheet Mobile and KinHR. Together, this created the ultimate workplace happiness tech stack for small businesses, taking care of payroll, as well as time and attendance and people management. Wagepoint’s customer base grew to 23,000 in 2022, and the company processed $8.1 billion in Canadian payroll – that’s a whole lot of time saved on spreadsheets and paper cheques!

What’s next: There’s so much goodness “cooking” for 2023! Wagepoint is getting ready to release a whole new, upgraded version of its payroll software this year, as well as a release of Time by Wagepoint in the coming months. As always, the plan also involves providing customers with the world’s friendliest support, continuing to champion small businesses and start-ups, and having a whole lot of fun doing it.

Ask from the community:
Sign up for Wagepoint on our website.
Check out our open roles and apply today.

3. Klir

Founded: 2018
Founders: David Lynch (CEO) & Elaine Kelly (COO)
Website: https://klir.com

Elevator Pitch: Humanity is grappling with increasing water demand but dwindling access to our most precious resource. We’re facing new challenges on a scale never seen before: from flash-flooding, to mega-droughts.

As we evolve to face these new challenges, Klir is on a mission to make water better by empowering the people who manage our water systems with the critical insights and data they need: from water quality and compliance, to sustainability initiatives and and beyond. The result? Water managers can adapt, and act, faster.

How it got started: Co-Founders David Lynch and Elaine Kelly were working with global utilities to build and implement IT systems. They saw first-hand how difficult it is to manage the critical data and tasks required to keep our water clean, safe and secure. They launched Klir with the goal of freeing up the talented scientists and engineers who run our water systems from tedious administrative work, so they can focus on the big picture: making water better.

Growth to date: Over $20M raised to date, 50 employees, customers in USA, Canada & Australia

What’s next: Global expansion, including new customers in USA, Canada and Australia, and launching in Europe.

Ask from the community: Looking to hire. In 2023 Klir is growing its engineering and product teams; sales, marketing & customer success. Among the perks: annual global offsites to destinations from Jamaica to Ireland and unlimited paid time off.

2. Badal 

Founded: 2018
Website: https://badal.io/

Elevator Pitch: Badal is a boutique consulting firm specializing in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services. We are the largest and fastest growing firm of our kind in Canada, and we work with some of the most prestigious clients in the financial, retail, and telecom industries. Our team of experts is dedicated to helping our clients succeed by providing world-class solutions for cloud migration, data strategy, data governance, analytics, machine learning, and more. We have a proven track record of delivering results, and we are passionate about helping our clients thrive in the cloud.

How it got started: As the world becomes increasingly reliant on cloud technologies, Google Cloud has been at the forefront of this movement, rapidly growing in response to the global adoption of cloud services. However, despite this growth, we noticed a significant gap in the market – a lack of high-quality technical and consulting talent with expertise in Google Cloud. This gap presented a major obstacle for enterprises looking to leverage the full power of Google Cloud, and it threatened to hold back the adoption of cloud technologies as a whole. That’s why we started this company – to bridge that gap and provide enterprises with the resources they need to keep pace with the changing needs of consumers and the rapidly evolving business landscape.

Growth to date: Our growth as a company has been truly impressive. In just three short years, our team has grown at a remarkable rate of 5x each year, and we are now proud to have a team of approximately 70 skilled and dedicated Badalers. We attribute much of our success to our growing list of prestigious clients in the financial, retail, and telecom industries, as well as our ability to provide solutions for complex data challenges using cutting-edge technology. Our strong retention rate of 98% is a testament to the positive culture and opportunities for growth that we offer at Badal. We are excited about the future and are committed to continuing to provide exceptional services to our clients.

What’s next: We expect to grow even more in 2023 with a focus on expanding our data governance and API strategy practices in response to legislative and regulatory initiatives.

Ask from the community: We are looking for talented individuals that are passionate about their craft, believe in democratizing data on the cloud, and above all, willing to learn and grow together with Badal. We take pride in establishing a learning-first culture at Badal, and to help you begin this new adventure with us, your GCP credentials are on us!

1. Index Exchange

Founded: 2004
Founder: Andrew Casale
Website: https://www.indexexchange.com/

Elevator Pitch: Index Exchange is a global advertising marketplace whose technology connects media owners and buyers to buy and sell advertising space, all within milliseconds. Founded in 2004 and now with over 500 employees and offices in North America, EMEA, and APAC, Index Exchange is an engineering-first organization focused on learning, collaboration, and innovation. The company is led by President and CEO Andrew Casale. In Canada, the company has offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, and Montreal, with many open roles in each. For a full list, click here.

How it got started: Index Exchange started nearly 20 years ago as a very young enterprise on the web and recognized that ad tech provided a huge opportunity to drive total market efficiency. Ultimately, our business was built to deliver innovations for media owners and buyers and to support a thriving media economy. Over half of our employees are in either product or engineering, building on behalf of our customers and tackling large-scale technical challenges. We are constantly investing in our data centers, our infrastructure, and our engineering teams – who are all focused on solving big data problems that will all allow infuse efficiency into our business model and return that added value back to our customers.

Growth to date: Index has a rapidly growing team and boasts 17 global offices. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, we have employees all over the world and even welcomed nearly 100 new Indexers in 2022.

What’s next: We’re continuing to grow and have several open roles. Be sure to check out our careers page for more information!

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