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Q4 LOOKS TO RAISE $150 MILLION CAD THROUGH IPO


June 10, 2021

Toronto-based investor relations (IR) software company Q4 has priced its planned initial public offering and is looking to raise $150 million CAD.

In its amended prospectus filed Thursday, Q4 said it plans to price its shares between $10.50 and $13.00 per common share.

With an approximate 59 million in common shares issued if Q4 reaches its funding target, the company could reach a market capitalization of almost $700 million.

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Q4 offers cloud-based IR and capital markets solutions that reach across websites, virtual events, corporate access, data and analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), and capital markets intelligence.

Q4 claims its platform is used by approximately 2,400 public companies, including half of the S&P 500’s constituent companies, with more than 12 million investors using it every month, as of March 31, 2021.

The company’s prospectus notes Q4 saw strong demand for its offering last year, with revenue jumping 80 percent to $40.4 million USD. The company’s net loss in 2020 totalled approximately $13 million USD. Though Q4 is not yet profitable, the company said it sees a path to profitability as it continues to scale.

 

So Toronto #2 in that list and Montreal #4

But...then they have a smaller 'Large' Cities category...........in which Vancouver is #1 and Calgary #8

Finally they have a 'mid-sized' City category......this one is eye-popping......

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That 5/10 are Canadian Cities.

** always important to take these lists with a large grain of salt.

They are based on somewhat arbitrary indicators with somewhat arbitrary weights.

Still.... 9 cities in the 30 they chose to rank........nice to be on the radar.
 
So Toronto #2 in that list and Montreal #4

But...then they have a smaller 'Large' Cities category...........in which Vancouver is #1 and Calgary #8

Finally they have a 'mid-sized' City category......this one is eye-popping......

View attachment 329223

That 5/10 are Canadian Cities.

** always important to take these lists with a large grain of salt.

They are based on somewhat arbitrary indicators with somewhat arbitrary weights.

Still.... 9 cities in the 30 they chose to rank........nice to be on the radar.
They seem quite enamored with the GTHA.
 

A look inside what’s driving Toronto’s innovation economy


June 21, 2021

Toronto’s innovation economy is booming. Last year, in the depth of the pandemic, VCs invested $1.2 billion in Toronto companies, including highly publicized raises from Wealthsimple and Maple. Even two or three years ago, rounds in the tens of millions were major news. Today, they’re almost routine. Startup Waabi Innovation’s successful U.S.$83.5-million raise is just the most recent example of the city’s upward trajectory.

To get a more detailed look at how the startup scene is maturing, the Innovation Economy Council partnered with the City of Toronto to survey the network of support that helps cultivate these startups and creatives. The recently released report, A City of Entrepreneurs: Building a City of Innovation, a first of its kind, reveals a thriving community of organizations that teaches and fosters entrepreneurship.

The numbers are impressive. Collectively, the 36 hubs surveyed support more than 5,000 ventures in software and creative industries as well as in burgeoning fields like cleantech, green construction and advanced manufacturing. In just the last decade, the number of accelerators and incubators has exploded, with 17 arriving since 2015 alone.


 

Toronto’s Top Hat buys fourth conventional publisher, stepping up efforts to digitize textbook business


Aug 26, 2021

Toronto online education company Tophatmonocle Corp. has made its fourth acquisition of a traditional course-material publisher as it advances its strategy to digitize the textbook business.

The company, known as Top Hat, said on Thursday it had bought Denver-based Morton Publishing Co., a 44-year-old independent press that publishes more than 600 lab and course materials focused on the sciences, which are used at 1,500-plus institutions in the United States.

Terms were not disclosed, but Top Hat chief executive officer Joe Rohrlich said the price was “in a consistent range with prior acquisitions” by his company. The Globe and Mail has reported Top Hat paid US$20-million to US$30-million each for U.S. publishers Fountainhead Press and bluedoor, as well as the university textbook publishing business of Nelson Education Ltd., picking up a combined 1,300 titles before the Morton deal.

 

Toronto AI startup Cohere raises US$40-million as it looks to bring Google-quality predictive language to masses


Sept 7, 2021


A Toronto artificial intelligence startup, backed by some of the leading experts in the field globally, has raised US$40-million as it prepares to formally launch its technology to help make it easier for humans to talk to machines.

Cohere Inc., co-founded by protégés of AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean, said the funding was led by Index Ventures, a venture firm with headquarters in London and San Francisco that has also backed Slack Technologies Inc., Sonos Inc., Robinhood Markets Inc., and Etsy Inc. Other investors include venture capital firms Section 32 and Toronto’s Radical Ventures - which wrote the original cheque to fund Cohere - and renowned AI experts including Mr. Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel and Raquel Urtasun.

The startup says its natural language processing (NLP) software provides a richer understanding of human language, including semantics, sentiments and tone. As such, it improves on existing software that powers machine-human interactions such as online conversations between consumers and customer service chatbots. The idea is to provide the same quality of NLP models to a wide array of customers that only a handful of internet giants currently use.

 

Stripe to open Canadian office in Toronto, announces new products


Sept 28, 2021

Stripe is opening its first Canadian office in Toronto. The San Francisco-based FinTech company also announced the launch of several new products in Canada.

The company refused to disclose the number of people it plans to hire in Canada as part of the expansion. Though it did note plans to hire for roles in engineering, product, and sales in Toronto.

Stripe’s recruiting page on its website shows 15 open positions in Toronto. The bulk of which are for engineers and software, as well as for a technical recruiter, and a centralized HR operations knowledge manager.

This team complements Stripe’s increasingly distributed engineering workforce, including in Dublin and its London FinTech office.

Founded in 2010, Stripe has developed software to help startups and enterprises accept online payments and with other financial operations. The company’s products include payments, billing, analytics, fraud prevention, and more.

Yunong Xiao, Stripe’s head of engineering in Canada and Toronto office lead told BetaKit, “We love that Toronto is the sixth largest FinTech hub.”

While he noted the Toronto office will play a significant role in the deployment and development of products, Xiao said the company is still finalizing some of the details of the office, “so I can’t share any specifics and don’t want to speculate.”

Stripe’s expansion into Canada isn’t entirely unexpected, given that the company has relationships with a number of major Canadian tech firms, including Shopify and Lightspeed.

One of the earliest users of Stripe in Canada may be SkipTheDishes. The food delivery network began using Stripe in 2015.

“Stripe’s products have played a major role in SkipTheDishes’s success over the years, supporting our growth as we’ve scaled from thousands to millions of customer transactions a month in communities all across Canada,” said Rob Stewart, director of engineering at SkipTheDishes. “We’re excited to see what impact this expansion will have on other internet businesses operating in Canada.”

 

Tech growth drives office leasing in Canadian cities: CBRE


Nov 11, 2021

The tech industry has been responsible for a large chunk of office leasing during the pandemic and Toronto leads the way in North America for tech job growth, according to CBRE’s annual Tech-30 2021 report.

Vancouver and Montreal also fared well and the report even offered some encouraging news for Calgary’s beleaguered office market – even before this week’s major announcement of an Amazon Web Services hub which will be created in the Alberta city.

Toronto saw 26 per cent job growth from 2019 to 2020, according to the report, which measures the tech industry’s impact on office demand and rents in the 30 leading tech markets in Canada and the U.S. The latest report covers until the end of 2020. Vancouver was in third place for tech job growth in 2019-’20 at 21 per cent.

“If anything, 2021 might be even a bigger year for Toronto from the tech growth perspective,” says Michael Case, managing director, office leasing at CBRE’s downtown Toronto office. “If we’re not No. 1, we’ll certainly be near the top of the list in 2021.”

Toronto on cover of Tech-30 report

Case says the city’s No. 1 ranking and appearance on the report’s cover page “really puts Toronto and Canada on the map from a global perspective, if we weren’t there already. This is going to put even more spotlight on Toronto.”

Case says job growth in Toronto’s tech industry led to a significant 17 per cent rental growth in Q2 2021 versus Q2 2019 in the brick-and-beam Downtown West submarket, which is popular with tech tenants.

 

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