The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Oct 2023

HaiLa Technologies develops ultra-low-power multi-protocol radio communications, including Wi‑Fi, aimed at enabling ambient IoT sensing. Its core products are energy-efficient system-on-chip (SoC) solutions and related implementations such as backscatter to minimize radio power use. The company plans to commercialize these SoCs to extend device battery life, enable smaller batteries, and reduce battery waste. Customers and partners target smart home and building automation, consumer electronics, mobile, industrial, transportation, medical, and agriculture markets. HaiLa was founded in 2019 in Montreal and was originally conceptualized at Stanford University. Financially, HaiLa has raised USD $16.8 million to date, including non-dilutive financing from Sustainable Development Technology Canada and TechnoClimat Quebec, and recently announced an additional USD $10.35 million financing.

Led · Seed · Jun 2023

Brilliant Matters designs and produces printable, flexible semiconductor products aimed at lowering costs and environmental impact for solar applications. The company plans to increase production capacity to support a new generation of high-performance products. Funding will also support commercialization efforts and a scale-up of marketing to enter other high value‑added markets. The recent financing is intended to accelerate production, scaling and broader commercial rollout. The company received legal advice from a Fasken team (Henrick Simard and Frédéric St‑Jean) in connection with the raise. Jurisdiction reported in the articles is Québec. Brilliant Matters produces printable, flexible semiconductors and related polymers and compounds using a proprietary, eco-friendlier synthesis technology aimed at organic printed solar modules and other printed electronics. Its materials reportedly increase performance and stability of organic printed solar modules, addressing key competitive factors in the solar market. The company plans to scale up manufacturing operations to produce hundreds of kilograms per year and to expand commercialization efforts with the help of strategic partners. Brilliant Matters positions its production method as clean, reliable and cost-effective compared with traditional electronics manufacturing. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Quebec City, Quebec. Financially, it closed an oversubscribed seed round to fund the planned production and commercialization scale-up.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2022

Potloc is a Montreal, Canada-based research technology company that provides machine learning-driven social media sampling technology to help consulting firms and brands target respondents worldwide with high precision and speed. Its platform serves B2C and B2B customers across retail, consumer goods, food services, financial services, healthcare, transport/automotive, manufacturing and industrial equipment. Customers include Roland Berger, KPMG, EY-Parthenon, Lowe’s and L'Oréal. The company plans to use new funds to accelerate its go-to-market strategy in North America and Europe and to further develop its social media sampling technology. Potloc expanded from 60 to 230 employees in the past year and plans to hire 120 more staff in Montreal, New York and Paris. Potloc uses social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to target and sample well-defined audience segments for consumer research. Its platform aims to improve the quality, specificity and accuracy of surveys for clients across sectors. The company has executed hundreds of surveys for multinational consulting firms, research organizations, consumer brands, commercial real estate developers, financial institutions and trade groups. Clients named in the article include Boston Consulting Group, Ernst & Young, Mall of America, Carrefour, L’Oréal, Invesco and Cushman & Wakefield. Headquartered in Montreal and founded in 2014, Potloc already maintains offices in North America and Europe. The company plans to use new funding to further develop its solution and expand global reach, including entering the US market with a new New York office and a country head to oversee expansion there. Potloc conducts geo-targeted, non-incentivized surveys through social networks to provide localized consumer insights and shopping-habit data. The company says it can capture responses from about 1,000 people within a one-kilometre radius, which it positions as more granular than traditional phone or web-panel methods. Clients include large brands and property operators such as L’Oréal, Cadillac Fairview, Loblaws, and Cushman-Wakefield. Potloc operates offices in Montreal and Toronto as well as Paris and Geneva and was founded in 2014. The Series A capital is intended to fund geographic expansion into the northern U.S., the U.K., and parts of western Europe, plus growth into new verticals like grocery, CPG, financial institutions, and research firms. The company is investing in AI capabilities to improve respondent acquisition, retention, and data analysis while revamping marketing and mapping customer journeys to scale across two continents. Since closing the round in July, Potloc has expanded its Canada and U.S. sales teams and is hiring about 30 new employees, including for Europe. POTLOC’s platform targets people within specific locations on social media and runs hyperlocal intercept surveys to predict retail and site performance. The company can track insights from roughly 1,000 people within a one-kilometre radius, contrasted with industry phone-call approaches across wider regions. Its product helps retailers, real estate companies and municipalities understand neighborhood shopping habits, improve underperforming stores, and gauge local receptiveness to new businesses. The founders began with in-person iPad surveys and emphasize engaging younger, mobile-first respondents who no longer rely on landlines. POTLOC has offices in Montreal and Lille and plans to open offices in Paris and Toronto. The company will use the new funding to invest in research and development, including standardizing questions across markets, developing sampling algorithms for campaigns, and extracting deeper insights from collected data.

Led · Seed · May 2022

Zorah biocosmétiques produces certified organic, fair‑trade, cruelty‑free skincare and positions itself as a leader in healthy beauty. The company has launched a foundation funded by 1% of its sales to support education for young girls and mothers. CED awarded the company a $450,000 repayable contribution to improve productivity and support market expansion. Planned uses include purchasing production equipment (machinery, distillation station, tube filler, automatic jar filling machine, among others) and executing a marketing plan to enter new markets. Marketing activities will cover promotional materials, travel, trade fairs, and hiring commercial officers in targeted markets. Company leadership has stated plans to expand into Morocco and Dubai, and the business is presented in the article as based in Montréal. Tengiva operates a digital supply‑chain platform that enables apparel brands to source textiles directly from manufacturers via an online marketplace. The platform hosts millions of dollars of inventory, more than 300 distinct materials, and serves brands in 30 countries. Tengiva centralizes structured textile data to support sustainability features including CO2 emissions calculations, material recyclability guidance, and recommendations to reduce chemical use. The company relaunched its proprietary technology after participating in the 2021 Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders, completed beta testing, and reconfirmed product–market fit. Tengiva plans to use new capital to commercialize the platform, build a state‑of‑the‑art warehouse, and execute a global expansion strategy in 2022. The company was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Quebec, Canada.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2021

Rithmik Solutions develops an artificial-intelligence platform that ingests high-resolution data from mixed mobile mining fleets and converts it into actionable guidance for operations and maintenance teams. Its analytics go beyond predictive maintenance, enabling mines to detect issues earlier, improve equipment reliability, and increase production efficiency while reducing environmental impact. The software is fully OEM-agnostic, supporting all major mining equipment brands and addressing customers’ need for interoperable, site-wide solutions. Headquartered in Montréal, the company positions itself as a key enabler of smart, sustainable mining by aligning operational and maintenance priorities around data-driven insights. With fresh Series A funding, Rithmik plans to accelerate global expansion, broaden its product suite, and integrate into additional digital mining ecosystems. Financial or user metrics were not disclosed in the article.