Thanks to all that have taken the time to participate in the funding survey. Results of the survey can be viewed by clicking here for powerpoint or by clicking here for pdf.
I’ll have more in future posts on addressing some of the results of the survey and some of the findings that have emerged/questions that people have on the funding process.
Thanks to all that have filled in the startup funding survey (see this article). The survey will be closing this Friday and I’ll post the results next week. So if you have not already filled it out and would like to provide your input, click here to start the survey.
So far, here are the results for the question on ease/difficulty of finding funding.
I Love Rewards, based in Toronto, has secured $6.9M in Series B funding from JLA Ventures, Laurence Capital, and GrandBanks Capital to fuel continued growth. This brings the total raised to $11.7M.
The company, founded by Razor Suleman, offers a web based rewards program used by businesses to motivate their employees. Rewards are tied to performance metrics, everything from sales quotas to reduced absenteeism. Revenue has doubled year over year with keynote customers adopting the solution including: Microsoft, Marriott, ConAgra, and Bell.
Ryan Moore, General Partner of GrandBanks Capital had this to say: “The I Love Rewards vision of becoming the global leader aligns with our desire to invest in the best growth companies in Canada. I Love Rewards offers a compelling value proposition with its innovative proprietary Software-as-a-Service technology that provides immense value to human resource and sales professionals across North America.”
GrandBanks Capital’s participation is notable. You might recall that this Boston based fund sent out an open letter soliciting pitches from Canadian startups. It would be fair to say GrandBanks is putting their money where their mouth is, which is great to see!
Congrats to Razor and the I Love Rewards team.
I’ve been thinking that we need to create a local incubator, and I’ve started to wonder where this fits in Jevon’s vision of saving VCs in Canada. And it’s an easily understood way to go about deploying small amounts of capital and managing the risks associated with the investments. There are folks beginning to do this in Vancouver, and Montreal. They provide entrepreneurs with capital, education, mentorship, promotion mechanism, market development, among other offerings. They are angels, VCs, and others hustling to find deals, to help their portfolio grow and be successful. Most of all we need to lead by example. We need to build real companies like Well.ca, FreshBooks, DayForce, Rypple, PlentyOfFish, ElasticPath, Idee, and others. The focus needs to be, not on raising money, but on finding customers and solving problems for the marketplace. There is money is available to help companies once they’ve found a customer, when they need to do marketing, additional product development, etc.
The gap that is identified is at the very earliest stage of the investment pipeline. There are less entrepreneurs starting fundable companies. This is because there have been less successful startups that spinout human capital, culture and ideas. The lack of Fairchildren means there are less successful individuals that have earned their pedigree and training at a successful startup. Basically, there is a bunch of stuff that can be best learned by doing it for another startup (success or failure). It’s not only about technology, it’s about finding customers, raising money, building products, doing business development, developing personal and professional networks, learning how to do sales, etc.
But we’ve had a dearth of these startups? Maybe not, but there has definitely been a dearth of Fairchildren from these companies. Definitely not enough to create a viable, self-sustaining ecosystem of entrepreneurs and angel investors in the technology space. And this has left a gap in the very early-stage entrepreneurs and funding creating early-stage technology ventures. This gap may have longer term repercussions, the most easily identifiable is in the declining number of early stage investment in Ontario.
Who is motivated to create an environment with early stage deals, educated entrepreneurs and culture of educated risk taking? Who is going to do the hustling to make these ventures happen?
David Crow’s post on incubators nicely summarized the startup support ecosystem situation in Toronto and in follow-on discussions some key areas have been identified on what is needed to better support entrepreneurs in Toronto:
In terms of financing, I see two sides to this point depending on who you talk to. From the entrepreneur’s standpoint, you would hear comments on the difficulty of finding financing (i.e. who to approach, time it takes, terms imposed, etc). From the funder’s standpoint, you would hear comments on the difficulty in finding quality companies (i.e. viable business model, good pitch, strong management, etc).
To help closethe gap, I would like to capture more information about the funding requirements, concerns, experiences of startups. I have put together a quick survey (3 parts – should only take 5 minutes to complete).
If you are part of a startup that has either raised funding before or will need to raise funding in the future, I would value your input and participation in the survey.
Click here to launch the survey.
Summarized results will be published on StartupNorth and will help drive future educational topics around the funding process.
If you would like an overview of the angel funding process you can read an organized collection of articles here.
craig at mapleleafangels.com