Archives

Markets change. Venture debt doesn’t have to.

Amy Olah vividly remembers the moments in her career when startups faced “extinction-level events.” As Head of Canada and US West Coast Originations at CIBC Innovation Banking, she is constantly tuned into the market shifts that influence high-growth startups, especially as they relate to one of the bank’s key services: venture debt. “Venture debt is […]

Lessons from Wattpad’s $754-million exit

Investor Deck is a six-article series presented by Sage, offering tips for SaaS startups from Canadian VCs. Read the most recent installment here. In the early days of Wattpad, Eva Lau remembers a piece of advice she often heard for founders: craft your exit strategy early. The company already knew something about building narratives. Wattpad, […]

BC Securities Commission fines ezBtc owner $18.4 million over crypto fraud

A British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) panel has imposed an $18.4 million fine and a lifetime ban from the capital markets on ezBtc and its owner David Smillie.  The penalty stems from BCSC finding this past August that ezBtc, a Nanaimo, BC-based cryptocurrency trading platform, committed fraud by lying to its customers and diverting approximately […]

Canada Post strike didn’t slow Shopify’s record-breaking BFCM weekend

Shopify has broken its sales record for the Black Friday-Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend yet again, despite warning that an unresolved Canada Post strike would “devastate” the Canadian economy last week.  Shopify has beat its BFCM sales record every year since it started sharing the data.  According to Shopify’s retrospective report of the weekend, the e-commerce […]

Stability and speed: Mastercard’s partnership with Koho

Koho CEO Daniel Eberhard took the stage at the Elevate Festival in October and provided an update on his company’s ongoing work to secure a Schedule 1 banking licence. If successful, Koho will be the first Canadian FinTech startup to achieve this regulatory status. “We want the ability to control our own destiny,” Eberhard explained […]

AI chipmaker Tenstorrent closes nearly $700-million USD Series D at $2.6-billion valuation

Canadian-founded, United States (US)-based artificial intelligence (AI) hardware company Tenstorrent has secured more than $693 million USD in Series D funding from a slew of big-name investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s investment firm and electronics giant Samsung. The AI chipmaker said it plans to use the funding to build out its open-source AI software […]

Online brokerage Questrade lays off undisclosed number of employees

Toronto-based online brokerage and wealth management firm Questrade Financial Group has laid off an undisclosed number of employees.  Questrade has previously said that it had more than 2,000 employees globally. The layoffs were first reported by The Canadian Press and confirmed by BetaKit.  “This change is not reflective of the state of [Questrade’s] underlying businesses, […]

Lightspeed lays off 200 employees in second restructuring of the year

Montréal-based e-commerce and point-of-sale giant Lightspeed Commerce is laying off approximately 200 employees in its second restructuring effort this year.  The cuts were made as Lightspeed looks to execute on its profitable growth strategy and “prioritize resources for strategic areas of the business,” the company said in a statement. Following the layoffs, Lightspeed is actively […]

Why Hopper might be the next Canadian tech company to play the secondary game

Wealthsimple recently became the latest major Canadian technology company to benefit from a booming global secondary market. Hopper could be the next. Secondaries have become an increasingly popular means of generating liquidity amid a continually cool exit market. Jefferies Private Capital found global secondary volume hit a record $68 billion in H1 2024. Along with […]