Canadian Fintech: VC funding for VC funding 🔁
Harvest solves AR collections. Terenet gets back in conveyance. Wealthsimple beefs up banking.
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💰 Funding
Software to help VC’s manage their investors suddenly became hot:
Harvest, an accounts receivable collections platform for SMBs raised $1m from Simple Ventures, the venture studio from Wealthsimple co-founder Mike Katchen.
Finofo, a Calgary based business payments and banking platform, raised $3.3m from WaterTower, SaaS Ventures and Motivate.
Hiive, a marketplace for private companies to sell pre-IPO shares, is looking to raise $100m. They handled nearly $1b in transactions last year.
🤝 M&A
Teranet, a land registry business, acquired a majority stake in GoVeyance, a BC based conveyance software.
Conveyance is the legal transfer of property ownership and involves managing legal docs, handling payments, and registering the new ownership with the land registry. Since Teranet IS the land registry, it makes sense for them to offer an end to end solution.
This is Teranet's second successful swing at conveyance: In 2008 they acquired a small conveyance vendor called DoProcess. In 2020 they sold it to Dye & Durham for an eye watering $530m (24x earnings).
LottoLend, a prize-linked consumer lender that launched late last year in the Prairies, was acquired by Blue Copper Capital.
Borrowers are entered into a weekly lottery when loans are paid back on time.
E-xact Transactions, a Vancouver based payment processor that does over $3.5b in volume was acquired by Paynt, a European POS and gateway.
Assent, an Ottawa based compliance software for the supply chain industry was acquired for $1.3b by Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.
🚀 Product
Wealthsimple launched a credit card and a bunch of chequing account features like mobile cheque deposit, wires and bank drafts.
Canadian lenders are growing:
True North Mortgage crossed $6.6b in mortgages under administration.
Pine crossed $1b in mortgages.
Goeasy passed $5b in consumer loans.
Shopify will allow shoppers to pay their merchants in stablecoins.
Clearco launched an early repayment option. The company pivoted into exclusively offering invoice funding two years ago.
The federal government’s payroll system is switching from IBM to Dayforce, a Toronto based HR platform.
Sezzle, a US based BNPL is suing Shopify, claiming it unfairly prioritizes its own BNPL service over competitors. Shopify works with Affirm to offer BNPL.
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Have a great week! See ya 👋