Canadian Fintech: Funding for Float 🤑

Jan 20, 2025

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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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.

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.

Hear from executives at Canada’s largest auto finance companies.

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.

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 that resulted in a USD $3b fine.
- Several board members are also resigning.

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Have a great week! See ya 👋