Canadian Fintech: Funding for Float 🤑

Good morning! Welcome back to the Canadian Fintech Newsletter, an industry roundup for founders, operators and investors.

Every Monday we break down the hottest topics in the industry in under 3 minutes.

For those of you in Toronto, on Jan 28th I’ll be moderating a panel with the founders of Loop, Borrowell and Yield Exchange.

Also if you’re looking for a short pod on Canadian fintech, I was on the last episode of the Fintech Fuse Podcast.

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💰 Funding

• Float, a Toronto based corporate card and expense management platform, raised $70m, led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from OMERS, FJ Labs, Garage Capital and Teralys.

  • Float raised $50m in credit in 2024 and $37m in equity in 2021.

  • Here’s my breakdown of Float’s product strategy.

• Ownwell, a Vancouver based marketing automation tool for mortgage brokers, raised an undisclosed pre-seed led by Conconi Growth Partners.

  • The company is very similar to Homebot in the US.

• Gumloop, a Vancouver based tool that automates tasks like processing email invoices and contacting recruits on Linkedin, raised USD $17m from Nexus Venture Partners, YC, and First Round Capital.

  • Gumloop raised USD $3.1m last July.

  • The company is now relocating to San Francisco.

• Vasco, a Montreal based sales & marketing analytics platform for b2b software companies raised USD $6m from Inovia, Framework & BY Venture Partners.

• Sellit9, a platform for shoppers to trade-in their old products in exchange for cash, raised $1.5m from Drive Capital and Northside Ventures.

  • Here’s a breakdown of the intersection between fintech and supply chain tech.

• Borderless, a Toronto based HR platform for companies to hire international employees, raised $5m from the co-founders of Cohere, a Toronto based AI LLM company.

  • This is an extension round to the $24m they raised last year.

  • The funding will be used to build more HR automation tools like searching through corporate policies & guidelines.

🤝 M&A

• QuoteMachine, a Montreal based platform for merchants to manage quotes, orders, inventory and payments was acquired by Lightspeed, a Montreal based payments company.

  • QuoteMachine raised $5m in 2023 from Manresa, Clocktower and Precursor Ventures.

• Blade Labs, Toronto based company which provides staking infrastructure for Solana was acquired by WonderFi, a crypto exchange.

• Bench, a Vancouver based bookkeeping startup that was acquired by Employer.com after abruptly shutting down last month, had $94m in debt and only $4m in cash.

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🚀 Product

• Ratehub, a Toronto based mortgage comparison site, expanded into consumer loans.

  • Ratehub also owns its own mortgage lending business called CanWise. I’m curious to see if they’ll launch a similar personal lending business now.

  • Ratehub was acquired by Novacap, a Toronto based private equity group in 2022.

• Ribbon, a Toronto based back office platform to register and manage small businesses launched features for tax filing / tracking & for employee reimbursements.

• Sagard, a Montreal based alternative investment firm, launched a private fund for retail investors.

  • Sagard already has a b2b2c retail distribution partnership between its credit fund and Wealthsimple.

  • Brookfield and BlackRock have launched similar offerings recently.

• Venturevest, an alternative investment marketplace for retail investors launched in Montreal.

• Transcard, a US b2b payments company has expanded into Canada.

  • Finix, Transact365 and Lithic have also expanded their payments businesses to Canada this year.

⚖️ Policy

• BMO Capital Markets is paying a USD $40m settlement over SEC allegations that it misled investors about the construction of its mortgage-backed securities from 2020 to 2023.

• CCI, a trade group for Canadian tech companies launched a think tank called Canadian Shield, to produce policy research on Canadian “economic nationalism” like national security, tax policy, and promoting homegrown innovation.

  • Like CCI, the group was founded by Jim Balsillie of BlackBerry fame.

• TD’s CEO is stepping down two months earlier than previously announced, following the bank’s guilty plea to a drug money laundering scandal thatresulted in a USD $3b fine.

  • Several board members are also resigning.

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Have a great week! See ya 👋

-Tal Schwartz