The founders behind FinTech-focused Flinks are back with another startup—but instead of financial data, they’re connecting businesses with utility data to track energy consumption.
Repeat founders Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf and Frédérick Lavoie have raised $4.5 million USD ($6.2 million CAD) for Deck, a new application programming interface (API) that allows businesses to track their energy consumption by making private utility data easily accessible.
The all-equity, all-primary seed financing round was co-led by Toronto-based Golden Ventures and San-Francisco-based, FinTech-focused Better Tomorrow Ventures. Montréal-based FinTech fund Luge Capital also participated, bringing Deck’s total funding to $6.5 million USD ($8.9 million CAD).
“Hiring people that will just have to connect and interface to download data makes completely no sense.”
Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf
Deck CEO
Deck CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf told BetaKit the company raised $2 million USD from angel investors earlier this year. The investment was mainly from friends and family who did well with previous investments in Flinks.
Building on their work at Flinks, the founders say that Deck is fixing a big corporate inefficiency by providing the infrastructure to compile data from all kinds of private, user-protected accounts.
“The biggest hurdle for companies to do sustainability reporting is generally acquiring the data,” Leboeuf said.
Before compiling data and generating corporate reports, large companies with several franchises may require someone to log in to individual utility bill accounts and download data. Deck’s team saw this as a wasteful process that could easily be automated.
“Technologically speaking, hiring people that will just have to connect and interface to download data makes completely no sense,” Leboeuf said.
Since these accounts are private to enterprises, Deck’s data infrastructure allows data from multiple password-protected accounts to live in one place. The main draw is sustainability reporting for businesses, which Deck aims to streamline with its access to data sources on water, fuel, and energy consumption.
“Deck has the potential to bring full transparency to an opaque industry. You can’t begin to optimize something without first measuring it,” Luge Capital general partner Karim Gillani wrote in an email to BetaKit.
Energy-related disclosure requirements are set to grow in Canada. Last week, the federal government announced intentions to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act to mandate climate and energy-related disclosures. The Canadian Sustainability Standards Board is also developing proposed sustainability reporting requirements for Canadian companies.
Deck connects to the energy provider and makes the data accessible all in one place. The company can analyze its energy consumption from a bird’s eye view, and use the front-end tool, Deck Self Serve, to glean insights from a navigable dashboard.
This infrastructure is helpful for companies with thousands of franchises, but Deck’s founders see it as useful to small businesses, too. “A lot of small SMBs are actually struggling to on a day-to-day basis to automate those use cases for lack of having that infrastructure available.”
Automating account connectivity and data compilation are familiar territory for Leboeuf and Lavoie, who co-founded the open banking platform Flinks in 2016. The Flinks API began by connecting consumer banking information with FinTech platforms without screen-scraping, competing with American intermediaries like Plaid. Flinks raised a total of $19 million in funding before it was acquired by National Bank in 2021.
RELATED: Middleware land grab: Flinks wants to kill screen-scraping and make APIs king
Now the co-founders are pivoting from seven years in open banking to what they call “open utility.” Both Lavoie and Leboeuf continued to work at Flinks up until last month, and fellow co-founders Julien Belisle and Bruno Lambert had also done tours of duty at the company.
“What’s happening here is first-time founders focus on technology. Second-time founders focus on distribution,” said Deck president Lavoie.
Deck is also relying on past Flinks relationships for financing. Karim Gillani, general partner at Luge Capital, previously invested in Flinks from seed to Series A. Lavoie and Leboeuf said they were thrilled to work with him again.
“They’re simply just like the best investors you can ask for a seed round, like, for previously exited founders like us,” Leboeuf said of Deck’s cap table.
As repeat founders, Leboeuf explained that client introductions and talent recruitment are more helpful to them than advice on how to actually run a business.
“The pool of talent that those firms have access to, and the pool of potential customers, like it just feels like they know everybody,” he added.
“They are second-time founders with a meaningful exit, yet maintain a level of humility, scrappiness and determination that we value,” Golden Ventures general partner Ameet Shah wrote in an email to BetaKit.
Beyond their familiarity with what’s required, Leboeuf and Lavoie said a focus on making utility data accessible—like water, energy, and waste data—sets them apart. But the pair’s ambitions with Deck extend beyond energy data.
“There is a massive demand for energy data right now, but the end goal for us is to be the infrastructure of the internet for user permission data,” Leboeuf said.
Deck currently numbers 14 employees but is not planning to scale or hire right now. Instead, Leboeuf and Lavoie said they are planning to use the $4.5 million USD to invest in product development—a lesson they learned from previous ventures.
“We’ll for sure know precisely when it’s time to 10x the team,” Leboeuf said.
Feature image courtesy Deck.