Prince Edward Island isn’t exactly a tech hub, but Charlottetown-based Tracktile has a secret weapon: the people.
“We focused on the messy, complex manufacturing from day one.”
Jordan Rose, Tracktile
Tracktile develops a manufacturing operations software platform for small, complex manufacturers, like those in the food and beverage industry. After fine-tuning its process to get away from founder-led sales, 2025 has been an “inflection point” for the startup, CEO and co-founder Jordan Rose told BetaKit in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Word of mouth has propelled the interest in Tracktile’s product, and its revenue figures, higher than ever, resulting in a $1.25-million CAD seed round to grow its global footprint and its team.
While Tracktile is remote-first, Rose admitted the company has a bit of a hometown-hiring bias, with 10 of its 16 employees on the island. PEI is not necessarily where Tracktile’s customers are, nor is it the easiest environment to raise money in, but it’s a “great base” to have certain employees as the business grows, he said.
“I would argue that Prince Edward Island has some of the best customer service reps in all of Canada,” Rose said. “Our Islander mentality–our friendliness–really shines, so we’re building our customer success team on Prince Edward Island.”
Rose started working in his parents’ fish processing plants when he was 12, so he’s intimately familiar with manual labour. But it’s not just the fish lines that were manual. Most operational management relies on filling out paperwork, punching data into Excel, and marking up whiteboards the old-fashion way.
When Rose grew into a software developer, he discovered that most bespoke enterprise resource planning (ERP) software was “incredibly expensive” and “incredibly complex.” Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) like his parents’ would either settle for subpar technology or pay exorbitant fees. Rose wanted to change that.
“What we’re looking to do is not just make a world-class solution and undercut everyone, it’s giving [SMBs] the exact tools they need at the time that they’re scaling and growing their company: so incredibly intuitive, easy-to-use, operations-focused software,” Rose said.
Tracktile doesn’t touch the financial side of the business, QuickBooks and Xero have that figured out, according to Rose, but Tracktile does help complex manufacturers automatically track their operations with AI, providing insight into production planning, forecasting, quality control checks, and regulatory compliance tools. SMBs use Tracktile to assess whether they’re making money and shipping on time, with a lot less data entry, Rose claimed.
Rose argued most other options in the space are “cookie-cutter,” which is not good when other forms of manufacturing have no variance. Tracktile’s customers aren’t making a uniform box of parts; seafood or poultry processors need to track the ever-changing weights and yields of their products.
“We focused on the messy, complex manufacturing from day one,” Rose said. “We abstracted what it meant to run a food and beverage manufacturing operation, and we built our system to be configurable enough to handle all those weird nuances and strange behavior that is complex manufacturing.”
Tracktile is now in 60 plants across North America, across Canada, and in 13 of the United States, Rose said. The company has grown over 800 percent since it raised a $575,000 CAD pre-seed round in July 2024, multiplying its customer base by a factor of 10 and increasing its annual recurring revenue from $24,000 to $300,000.
Rose expects to ride this momentum and multiply Tracktile’s revenue by five by the end of 2026. The fresh seed funding, raised entirely on a convertible note, will help with this. The round was co-led by returning investors BDC Seed Venture Fund and Island Capital Partners, with participation from Graphite Ventures.
The funding will fuel the expanded go-to-market effort, as well as research and development on new features. This includes a vision detection offering, which will plug AI into security cameras to monitor and log things like trucks pulling into the loading bay, where pallets are moved, production hiccups, and quality assurance.
“Everything in the manufacturing world is normally a reactive approach to things,” Rose said. “The future is going to be [an] intelligent, proactive approach to capturing the data [and] running a manufacturing plant.”
Rose sees Tracktile eventually opening an office in a traditional manufacturing hub, like Ontario or the West Coast, but for now he’s staying focused on the Island. The province has fewer people than most Canadian cities, but it’s provided Rose and Tracktile with a robust support network so far; when he brings his sales figures and vision for the future of complex manufacturing to investors, geography matters little.
“Investors want to back an underdog, right?” Rose said. “That’s kind of the PEI mindset, in a way, is that we’re small but mighty, and we’re willing to put in the work.”
Feature image courtesy Tracktile.