A group of former Shopify employees have closed $4.1 million CAD in seed funding to fuel their goal to turn Page into the go-to platform for government relations.
The Kitchener-Waterloo software startup is developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform designed to track government activity and policy changes. Page’s flagship product is an “AI lobbyist” to help organizations monitor, analyze, and influence governments in real time.
“The trade war and all the shifts that we’re seeing have caused a lot of uncertainty in the business world.”
Since its launch early last year, Page has advanced from a concept to a platform that offers coverage of governments across Canada, excluding municipalities and territories. The startup plans to use this fresh capital to invest in hiring and compute, and expand its platform to track government activity across the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK).
With a trade war underway and a federal election looming, Page co-founder and CEO Ben Cox argued that Page’s market timing “couldn’t have been better.”
“The uncertainty and the trade war and the tariffs and the change in government have really put a spotlight on companies needing to make sure they have good, clear, actionable insight into what’s happening … I think the current climate is just a really visceral example of why this is so important,” Cox told BetaKit in an interview.
Page’s all-equity, all-primary seed round closed in February. It was led by New York City’s Twelve Below, with support from fellow new investors, San Francisco-based Go Global Ventures and Canaan Partners, plus existing backers, Toronto’s Ripple Ventures and Kitchener-Waterloo’s Garage Capital. Cox declined to disclose Page’s valuation.
This financing brings Page’s total funding to more than $5.5 million CAD. That figure includes a $1.4-million CAD pre-seed round from April 2024, which was led by Ripple with support from Garage, the University of Waterloo’s Velocity Fund, and undisclosed angels, and was raised via simple agreement for future equity.
Founded in 2024 by Cox and CTO Elliot Dohm, Page is currently based at the University of Waterloo incubator Velocity. The Page co-founders previously spent approximately a decade working at Shopify in software development roles: Cox most recently served as a director of customer experience product engineering, while Dohm was an engineering manager.
The other members of Page’s now six-person team have all previously worked at Shopify and worked on AI tools for businesses.
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“We are excited to partner with Page because we believe Ben and Elliot are extraordinary founders with an ambitious vision to redefine how enterprises manage external relations with AI,” Twelve Below partner Byron Ling told BetaKit. “Recent technological breakthroughs in AI have made it possible to build products like Page, enabling companies to monitor, analyze, and influence government and media in real time at scale.”
For Cox, who studied politics and has always been interested in government, launching Page “was an opportunity to meld two worlds that I’m really passionate about” and build some tech for a space that he said features limited innovation.
Page claims its AI can ingest government data from a wide variety of sources, including video, audio, and written documents from committees, chambers, consultations, legislation, and news coverage, then analyze that info based on clients’ interests and concerns.
Collectively, this represents “an absolutely preposterous amount of data” that is often not well organized and, historically, difficult to navigate, Cox said.
Cox claimed that Page “makes it really easy to see what’s going on” and does so much faster and more efficiently than a human is capable of doing on their own. The startup is also working to provide more analytics and help customers figure out how to get in front of the right people in government and pitch them on the issues that impact their organizations.
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According to Cox, Page has been generating traction with a variety of customers, including large enterprises, growth-stage companies, industry associations, and government-relations consultancies across industries like tech, manufacturing, and insurance. This includes clients who previously did government relations and those who otherwise could not afford to do so.
“Companies and organizations of all sizes are probably more familiar now than they have been in a long time [of] just how important it is to keep tabs on [the] government,” Cox said. “The trade war and all the shifts that we’re seeing have caused a lot of uncertainty in the business world.”
“Recent technological breakthroughs in AI have made it possible to build products like Page.”
Byron Ling, Twelve Below
Ling noted that “these fast-paced changes at global, federal, and local levels are creating volatility for large enterprises and generating an overwhelming amount of data that is impossible for a human to track alone.”
According to Cox, what Page is doing had not been possible until very recently thanks to recent advancements in AI.
These days, Cox argues that organizations cannot afford to only pay attention to governments in their own jurisdictions; they also need to “have that cross-border or even global perspective.”
With its US and UK expansion, Page hopes not only to sell into those markets but also to provide its existing clients based in other countries with more insight from abroad. This includes moving down to the municipal level as well.
“We want Page to be the go-to platform for doing government relations for everybody,” Cox said.
Feature image courtesy the University of Waterloo.