Winnipeg-based advertising technology startup Taiv wants to turn business televisions across North America into revenue generation tools.
The company has announced $10.5 million USD ($14.4 million CAD) in Series A funding to accelerate its expansion into more large markets in the United States (US) and bring its adtech solution to Canada, with an initial rollout in its hometown this July ahead of a broader expansion next year.
“You can bring capital into the Prairies, you can bring capital into Canada.”
Noah Palansky, Taiv
Taiv has developed a product to help bars, restaurants, and retailers deliver more targeted ads and content to customers through their existing TVs, from commercials to sports highlights, venue-specific events and specials, and trivia. The company offers its solution for free, and makes money by selling ads, sharing a portion of those sales with venues.
Since launching in 2021 in the southern United States (US) due to COVID-19 restrictions, Taiv co-founder and CEO Noah Palansky claimed that the startup has found product-market fit. The company now serves more than 1,000 restaurants and bars and over 1,000 retail locations, including convenience stores and gas stations, in 14 US cities. It also works with major brands like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, BMW, Starbucks, ESPN, Fanduel, and Budweiser.
“Our biggest blocker right now to growing the company is just not being in enough cities and not being enough locations,” Palansky told BetaKit in an exclusive interview. “We know exactly how to sign them up. We have a great playbook with [a] good product, it’s just about going and spreading out.”
Taiv’s Series A round—which marks a sizeable financing for a Manitoba tech startup—consists of $7.75 million USD in primary, equity funding that the company closed last December, and $2.75 million in venture debt Taiv secured last month.
The equity portion was led by Denmark’s IDC Ventures with support from fellow new investors Emerging Ventures, which specializes in restaurant tech, and LGBTQ-focused Gaingels out of the US. Existing backers also participated, including Kitchener-Waterloo’s Garage Capital, US-based Y Combinator, FJ Labs, Pioneer Fund, adtech-focused Aperiam, and Mu Ventures. Undisclosed angels from advertising, tech, and sports were likewise involved, while Toronto’s RBCx provided the debt.
There was also a “small” amount of secondary in addition to the equity funding Taiv announced that went to the company’s founders, but Palansky declined to disclose exactly how much. He claimed the Series A was an up round but declined to share Taiv’s latest valuation.
This round brings Taiv’s total funding to $16.5 million USD ($22.6 million CAD), a figure that includes $6 million USD in previously unannounced seed funding raised across three tranches between late 2021 and early 2024.
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Taiv was founded in 2018 by Palansky, CTO Jordan Davis, and chief business officer Avi Stoller as the result of barroom banter while watching a hockey game. The startup offers a small box that connects to clients’ existing cable boxes and TVs and automatically switches between cable, streaming channels, digital signage, and trivia.
The startup’s proprietary AI model analyzes the live video feed and switches sources during commercial breaks, show changes, or based on the time of day. Palansky claimed that it offers especially fast offline video classification, running on low-powered hardware with less than 50 millisecond latency.
The CEO declined to share the startup’s exact revenue, but claimed Taiv is currently growing 10 percent month-over-month. Taiv has hit the ground running this year, expanding from 30 to more than 50 employees and completing its first acquisition, acquihiring a nascent, Kingston, Ontario-based startup developing a similar solution named Local Reach. It has simultaneously continued to invest heavily in product development. But Palansky indicated that city, location, and advertiser expansion are the startup’s biggest priorities at this point.
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“We’re in an industry where scale matters, and having scaled rollouts in major cities makes it a lot more appealing to advertisers, and having those large brands advertising with us makes it more appealing to restaurants,” Palansky said. “Those network effects are strong and a big part of why we raised this capital.”
Palansky views Taiv’s latest round as good news for both Winnipeg and Manitoba at large, as the province has historically garnered a disproportionately small share of Canada’s VC dollars.
“We have a great playbook with [a] good product, it’s just about going and spreading out.”
Despite Manitoba being home to 3.6 percent of Canada’s population, last year, less than one percent of VC investment in Canada went to the province’s startups, according to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA). The CVCA’s 2024 report found a mere $2 million CAD was invested in Manitoba—a 96-percent year-over-year drop—across four deals.
This is something that Trillick Ventures—a new Winnipeg-based fund that counts Palansky as a limited partner—is hoping to address.
“I think that people need, in this ecosystem, to see the types of funding that [are] possible, to see what you can do and how you can attract international investors,” Palansky said, highlighting that nearly all of Taiv’s Series A participants are from outside the country.
Palansky argued it demonstrates that, “You can bring capital into the Prairies, you can bring capital into Canada.” He sees Winnipeg as “a great city” in which to build a tech startup, and noted 80 percent of Taiv’s team is based there. “That’s how we intend to keep it.”
Feature image courtesy Taiv.