One of the biggest tech players in a small Québec town is getting into the corporate venture capital game.
Lavaltrie, Que.-based Devolutions, which describes itself as a productivity platform for IT professionals, announced a new venture division on Thursday. Devolutions Ventures is looking to make bets ranging from $500,000 CAD to more than $3 million USD on companies building technologies to meet IT and managed service provider needs, to create a “connected ecosystem of technologies.”
“We have very deep pockets for all kinds of opportunities.”
“We have very deep pockets for all kinds of opportunities,” Devolutions CEO David Hervieux told BetaKit in an interview (all quotes from Hervieux have been translated from French by BetaKit).
Hervieux said Devolutions Ventures will make investments in a few different ways: through simple agreements for future equity, purchases of common shares without voting power, and, for open-source projects, a “sponsorship” model to support the developer team behind the project without taking equity. The goal of the venture division is to “give these products a chance to explode on the market, but also to give them a safety net” by then looking to incorporate that product as a feature in Devolutions’ platform, Hervieux said.
Devolutions offers password management and remote desktop control, as well as other IT functions. La Presse has described the 250-person firm as “the little Québecois Google hiding in Lavaltrie,” a town of roughly 15,000 people northeast of Montréal. It has built somewhat of a tech campus, even setting up its own subsidiary construction company to provide lodging for employees and interns.
Hervieux has also been a supporter of Québec’s wider tech scene. He mentored the Laval-based co-founders of two cybersecurity startups—KeepSec Technologies and Vullify—both of which were acquired by Brossard, Que. tech firm Oriso this year.
Hervieux built Devolutions initially as a solo consultancy in 2004, then turned it into an IT services business in 2010. The company brought in $70 million CAD in revenue this past year and has scaled to more than one million users across 140 countries, all without taking on VC money. “We don’t need more capital, but we’re ambitious,” he said. “We have a very entrepreneurial vision.”
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Devolutions has so far made seven investments, acquisitions, and sponsorships as part of this new division, amounting to roughly $10 million, Hervieux said. There isn’t a set amount of money it plans to invest through Devolutions Ventures.
In June, Devolutions invested in Montréal performance monitoring platform Obkio; in July, it co-backed AI agent automator Mizo alongside Québec VC firm Telegraph Ventures. Not all of its targets are Québec-based companies—a few have been international companies that have created open-source frameworks, like Estonia’s Avalonia UI.
In a statement, Avalonia UI CEO Mike James said the Devolutions team “understand[s] our customers, our market and what it takes to build a technology company in this space.”
Feature image courtesy Devolutions.