While holiday shopping in Canada this year may lack the fervour that comes with sunnier economic conditions, e-commerce marketing teams are still determined to use digital channels to draw customers to checkouts.
“[Glowtify has] built a “painkiller” solution that businesses urgently need.”
Kevin Madill, Graphite
Canadian startups building marketing tools are in turn gearing up. Months after raising its pre-seed round, Montréal-based startup Glowtify has secured a $3.4-million CAD seed as it looks to become the go-to platform for small teams chasing big sales numbers. In an interview, CEO and co-founder Marc Allard told BetaKit the capital will fuel growth ahead of the busy holiday retail season.
“We wanted to make sure we scale go-to-market for that period [and] capture as much of the market as possible,” Allard said.
The all-equity round, which closed in August, was co-led by Montréal’s Accelia Capital and Toronto’s Graphite Ventures, with participation from new Montréal fund Telegraph Ventures, Edmonton-based Sprout Fund, Montréal-based DevCap, and angel investors.
Glowtify describes itself as a “command centre” for marketing leaders, particularly those on leaner e-commerce teams generating $500,000 of annual revenue or more. The platform aims to automate the collection of marketing insights, convert them into recommendations, and ultimately quadruple the amount of content that brands can push out across its channels. Using commercially available AI models, Glowtify suggests and creates posts to boost engagement based on seasonal trends and industry data.
While Glowtify had previously projected it would reach $2 million in annual recurring revenue by September, Allard said the company had scaled from zero to $1 million in revenue over the past year. He declined to share further context on the revenue metrics.
A trade war with the United States has dampened Canadian consumer sentiment heading into the holiday season. According to accounting firm PwC Canada, Canadians are planning to spend up to 10 percent less on holiday expenses, like gifts and travel, compared to last year. Nearly three-quarters of Canadians are planning to cut back on spending, according to a study from insolvency firm Harris & Partners.
Glowtify has increased its Canadian go-to-market strategy, but US brands make up a significant portion of its client base. While consumer sentiment has also taken a hit in the US, holiday spending is actually expected to grow more than four percent compared to last year and reach $1 trillion USD for the first time ever, according to the National Retail Federation.
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Glowtify will use the funding to invest in its go-to-market strategy and build out its AI engineering team. It has already hired across Canada, growing its team to 25 people, and plans to add more.
Since its pre-seed round, Allard said the company has “refined” its ideal customer base to target marketing teams of two to five people. “Small teams shouldn’t have to choose between speed and craft,” he said. The company wants to address the market need for a unified platform to give teams more time for creative efforts, as they cut time on orchestrating campaigns across multiple platforms.
The engineering team will work on connecting Glowtify’s AI agents with context from other platforms—like Shopify, WordPress, Klaviyo, and ChatGPT—to allow teams to access context from anywhere else a marketing team might be working.
Allard and his co-founders spun Glowtify up from an internal project at his digital e-commerce agency, Walter Interactive, after recognizing the opportunity in unifying marketing data. The technology is best suited to brands that sell on Shopify platforms due to a long history of data richness and integrations.
“We’ve followed them since their early stages, and their team has consistently shown exceptional speed of execution, rapid sales growth, and intense focus on capital efficiency,” Kevin Madill, partner at Graphite Ventures, said in a statement. “They’ve built a “painkiller” solution that businesses urgently need.”
Feature image courtesy Glowtify.