The name Ryan Holmes might be synonymous with Hootsuite, but those versed in Vancouver tech lore will know that the social media management mainstay was not his first gig.
Invoke, which Holmes founded back in the early aughts and would eventually spin out Hootsuite, is hard to pin down in just a word. Over the past two decades, it has evolved through multiple incarnations: product studio, digital media agency, and incubator.
Those various identities have shifted with changing leadership, but under current managing director Dominic Wong, Invoke has recently sought a return to its roots. Still avoiding any specific label, Wong describes Invoke today as “a company that builds digital products and starts new companies.”
After a seven-year hiatus from starting new companies, Invoke spun out Incrowd, a live-streaming tech startup, which today announced its first fundraise.
A newer face in the crowd
Vancouver-based Incrowd has secured $1.3 million CAD in funding from the Canada Media Fund (CMF), a public-private partnership funded by the federal government and the cable and satellite industries. The investment, which Wong classified as pre-seed funding, was closed in two installments: the first through a prototype application that awarded $250,000 to the startup in February 2023, and the remaining amount for production funding of $1.05 million closed in April 2024.
“It’s kind of putting the audience in the director’s seat.”
Incrowd co-founder and head of product Olivia Bell told BetaKit the investment in Incrowd is unique for the Canada Media Fund, which typically invests in video games and content production. “We’re the only software they’ve funded this year,” she said.
The startup is the brainchild of Invoke and 5X, a Vancouver festival covering music, visual art, fashion, and culture that needed to pivot to digital during the pandemic. The festival is an initiative of the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration Society (VIBC), a charity that works to support “progressive South Asian artistic expression.” Co-founders of Incrowd include Bell, Wong, and Tarun Nayar, the latter of whom is also an advisor to and former executive director of 5X.
5X approached the Invoke team with a problem: to make live events more resilient during a global pandemic. Together, the two organizations created a streaming smartphone app that enables live event attendees to easily stream and share their perspectives of the event.
The platform is marketed to event organizers, but attendees can use the platform to see what’s happening from other perspectives in real-time. For example, attendees at a music festival can see who’s on at a different stage as they’re performing. After the event, all footage is saved for the event organizer in Incrowd’s platform.
Bell explained that Incrowd aims to enhance the audience experience by allowing attendees to capture and view curated digital content alongside the live event. The company hopes that attendees who share event footage with their friends will trigger their FOMO (fear of missing out, in case you’re not familiar with youth slang) and encourage them to tune in or come to the event next time.
“It’s kind of putting the audience in the director’s seat,” Bell added.
Invoking a legacy
Understanding Incrowd’s path to its first fundraise requires a look back at the company that co-launched it. To do that, we return to Holmes, who recalls being holed up in an East Vancouver apartment in the year 2000, learning the basics of HTML and CSS. The dot-com bubble had just burst, and Holmes, without a job, decided to start his own digital agency focused on building web tools for clients.
In 2005, Holmes brought on David Tedman and Dario Meli as Invoke’s co-founders, and the team grew to over 20 people. Despite its service-oriented beginnings, the heart of the agency was always set on creating products, according to Holmes.
Invoke’s early focus was on developing tools for content management, e-commerce, and other areas. By 2009, the team had built a handful of products, all self-funded through Invoke’s services work.
“All of those products were profitable out of the gate,” Holmes claimed. “It was a different market back then for venture capital as well, and my background and DNA is that I always bootstrapped things.”
When Invoke added social media management to its roster of services in 2007, Holmes and the team realized the pressing need for better online tools in the space. “That was the aha moment for Hootsuite,” Holmes added.
The tool (beginning as Brightkit before changing its name to “HootSuite”—originally with a capital “S”) was developed internally at Invoke over the span of a year before it was spun out as a separate entity in 2010. Hootsuite would go on to raise $250 million in venture funding, grow to well over 1,000 employees, and become one of Vancouver’s most recognizable technology companies.
Holmes left Invoke to dedicate himself full-time to leading Hootsuite, but remained on Invoke’s board. Invoke continued to nurture and launch new startups, including corporate catering service Foodee (acquired in 2021), content marketing firm Quietly, and an online contest platform (formerly Memelabs, but later changed to Brightkit when it spun out of Invoke), which was later acquired by Hootsuite.
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As a board member, Holmes wasn’t the only one with a front-row seat to Invoke’s many shifts in the 2010s. Wong joined the organization as a designer the same year Hootsuite spun out, and quickly got involved with Invoke Labs, the agency’s newly launched incubator, where he spent two years helping to launch and build startups. He described the experience as “memorable and meaningful.” Invoke Labs eventually spun out of Invoke in 2012, only for the two to merge roughly two years later.
After 2013, Invoke saw a series of leadership changes, and with each new leader came different ideas of what Invoke could be. Among them was Chris Miller, who would later found homeowner care and warranty service platform Juniper; and Michael Smit, who would go on to hold leadership positions at Ziva Dynamics and Sun Machine Games.
“When you hire somebody in this market for an agency, you put your finger to the wind in terms of what the world needs right now,” Holmes added. “Through different eras, we had different CEOs with different visions, and we supported them as a board and followed their direction, with varying degrees of success and results.”
One of the defining characteristics of this period was that Invoke was not spinning out new companies. Wong noticed that Invoke was drifting from its product-building origins, transforming into a full-service digital agency—helping companies build websites, run campaigns, and create digital advertisements. By the time he became managing director in 2020, it had been seven years since Invoke had spun out its last company. To him, the writing was on the wall. “Agencies are dying,” Wong said bluntly.
But perhaps more importantly to him, launching products and startups “had always been the DNA” of Invoke, and as its freshly minted leader, he was determined to bring Invoke back to its initial vision.
“Our team’s skillset and expertise and history … was in building products and spinning out new companies,” Wong added. “The team and company needed a focused vision and direction—what we were doing before 2019 was too fragmented.”
Innovation (with guardrails)
Today, Invoke dedicates roughly 75 percent of its efforts to working with startups on new products and 25 percent to corporate innovation projects with larger enterprises, according to Wong.
The latter side of the business has involved Invoke developing an engineer-focused data visualization tool for Vancouver-based quantum startup D-Wave, and redesigning the British Columbia Automobile Association’s online home insurance purchase flow, which the company claims resulted in a 67-percent increase in conversion rate.
“We believe and have seen that corporate groups need to have that stamina, rigour, speed, and the scrappiness that a startup and lean startup team can bring,” Wong added.
For his part, Holmes is enthusiastic about this realignment to build products, but still supportive of the value of Invoke’s services side, noting he wants Invoke to innovate, but with “guardrails.”
“Culturally, everybody loves working on the new shiny project and incubating ideas, but they have to have business fundamentals and market demand. It’s [about] balancing the two things, and it’s a nice balance when somebody brings you a problem or idea that’s already pre-validated,” Holmes added.
A pivotal time
Incrowd ran its early prototype test in December 2021, was deployed at 5X Festival in 2022, and in 2023, the software was deployed at 26 events, including Bass Coast Friendsgiving in Vancouver and Amsterdam dance event Monstercat ADE. According to Bell, the startup is currently in talks with several event organizers for participation in activations for future events, including South by Southwest and the Vancouver International Film Festival.
The new funding will be used to support Incrowd’s product development, marketing, and go-to-market strategies.
Wong said while Incrowd’s focus is on music, arts, and cultural events, the startup is also eyeing another major event hitting its hometown next year. As BetaKit was first to report last month, Vancouver reached a three-year deal to host the rebranded Collision event, dubbed Web Summit Vancouver.
“Web Summit is an extremely huge conference, and it’s a really good opportunity for us to leverage that FOMO and the user-generated content,” Bell added. “I think we’ve all been in an instance where you go to a stage, have to choose between two, and then one you chose turns out to not be exactly as thrilling as you were hoping, and then you have to weigh that sunk cost of another stage. That’s a role that Incrowd could play.”
As Incrowd chases its growth ambitions, Invoke is also developing new projects. One of these includes Adopt-A-City, a citizen engagement platform that helps municipalities manage asset adoption programs.
Holmes, who is still on Invoke’s board, sees this as a pivotal time for the agency. “This is the most exciting time of the internet right now. There’s so much going on, and I think that all businesses are leaning in,” he said.
Holmes added that he believes Invoke is poised to tackle whatever lies ahead, whether by launching its own ventures or supercharging others.
Feature image courtesy Carmen Perry.