Toronto investment firm Rundle Partners has purchased a controlling stake in Halifax-based photography technology startup Iris Booth as the latter’s founder prepares to step back.
Both companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, which closed last month and marks Rundle’s first acquisition to date.
Rundle managing partner Ian Black described Iris Booth, which has built a profitable, growing business selling self-service photo booths and accompanying software to schools, companies, and healthcare institutions, as “an amazing Canadian success story.”
“We don’t do anything except one thing: we take the perfect headshot, every time.”
Sue Siri, Iris Booth
In an exclusive interview with BetaKit, Black said Rundle is set up to invest in small, profitable, high-potential, founder-owned Canadian startups, and Iris Booth fits that description perfectly. “It’s a really well-built small company that we think has the potential to grow into a much larger company, with a global footprint even, over time,” he explained.
Founded in 2015 by photographer-turned-tech CEO Sue Siri, Iris Booth aims to make high-quality headshots more accessible and affordable for large institutions through its photo booths and software. Iris Booth caters primarily to college, university, corporate, and healthcare campuses across North America.
Bringing in freelance photographers to take professional-quality headshots for social networks, identification badges, and other online profiles can be expensive and logistically challenging for big organizations. Iris Booth aims to offer a more cost-effective and convenient option.
Iris Booth’s 10-person team will stay on as part of the acquisition, with Ratehub founder and former CEO Alyssa Furtado also joining Iris Booth’s board of directors.
After nearly a decade at the helm of Iris Booth, Siri plans to gradually step back but remain involved, helping the firm bring on a new CEO and supporting the leadership transition. After which, she plans to continue providing strategic guidance at the board level. “The idea is for me to just take a really gentle off-ramp and eventually retire,” Siri told BetaKit in an interview.
Founded in 2023 and led by Black—a former leader at Shopify Retail, Uber Eats, and Uber Canada—Rundle focuses on acquiring well-run Canadian tech and tech-enabled companies and growing them as their founders step back. Rundle’s investors consist of a group of undisclosed individuals, most of whom are Canadian tech entrepreneurs or executives.
Rather than raise a fund, which Black said brings a pool of capital but also more constraints, with each acquisition, he noted that Rundle brings together the right group of investors in what Black described as a model that sits somewhere between private equity and venture capital.
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According to Black, Rundle does not have a particular time frame in mind for when it needs to sell or exit an investment. “We can take bigger bets, because some big bets take many years to pay off, and we can also lean into growth when it makes sense but also focus on sustainable growth when that’s more appropriate,” he said.
Today, Black said Iris Booth has hundreds of customers across North America, with 80 percent of its business coming from south of the border. Black declined to disclose the startup’s revenue, but noted that it is profitable—with profits in the “single-digit millions”—and has been growing 80 percent annually for several years.
“[Siri] created this technology that could sit in offices and campuses and take self-service headshots of a very high quality, and with the growth of online profiles … and everyone’s desire to look good, externally and internally, the product’s just taken off,” Black said.
Image courtesy Iris Booth.
The idea for Iris Booth came to Siri, a professional photographer with 25 years of experience, when she was approached by a university about taking thousands of graduation photos. While sitting around the dinner table one night, she jokingly suggested setting up her gear in a classroom, recording voice instructions, and giving the kids a remote to take their own photos.
Siri’s children thought this was a great idea so she built her first prototype in her living room out of cardboard and craft paper. The core idea behind Iris Booth was to figure out a way to mass-produce high-quality headshots—something she said many professional photographers prefer not to do.
“It’s like flipping burgers,” Siri said. “Gordon Ramsay doesn’t want to flip burgers—he doesn’t want to flip 4,000 burgers.”
Initially, Iris Booth went direct-to-consumer, setting up its booths in public places and charging for individual headshots, but the company quickly realized that this was not a winning combination. It eventually pivoted to a business-to-business model in the years before COVID-19, after which Siri said its growth accelerated.
The pandemic made things difficult for the startup, which counted big tech companies among its first clients. At that point, Iris Booth was just another amenity to try and draw in young, cool tech workers, and when those firms went remote, their need for Iris Booth disappeared.
Siri said this led Iris Booth to target more stable, recession-proof industries, and since then, the startup has seen its biggest success with postsecondary and healthcare clients. Today, Iris Booth does not take basic annual school or graduation photos but rather caters to students, teachers, and staff in career centres.
According to Siri, she has largely bootstrapped Iris Booth to date, save for a small amount of funding from family and friends and government subsidies for wages and hiring new students, and sought to grow the startup in a sustainable way. “I was always very careful, very lean, ran the company as small as I could and let growth drive spending, not spending drive growth.”
Black said Siri’s “really disciplined approach to growing while maintaining profitability” impressed Rundle. Iris Booth’s timing was also fortunate.
“For the longest time, I think people didn’t even recognize there was a market, let alone that we were the only player in this market, so we got to grow organically without spending a lot of money,” Siri said. To date, Iris Booth has grown primarily via word of mouth and events. Iris Booth’s event division, which enables it to make money while also showcasing its product to other prospective customers, has been the startup’s only form of marketing.
“[Iris Booth is] a really well-built small company that we think has the potential to grow into a much larger company.”
Two years ago, Siri said she thought she was getting too old to be working 18 hours per day and decided to explore a sale of Iris Booth, with the expectation that such a deal would likely take some time given the nature of the startup’s business. Iris Booth engaged PwC as a broker and brought in a number of offers. While the process ultimately took longer than she hoped, Siri said she was happy with the result.
The Iris Booth founder was immediately attracted to Rundle given Black’s background and the fact that two of his former employers—Shopify and Uber—were early adopters. After meeting with the firm, she said she felt confident Rundle would stay true to her vision for the business.
“This is very much a family business,” Siri said, noting that her husband, son, and brother all work for Iris Booth. “The joke is, I sold my family, and even though I’m willing to sell my family, I won’t sell them to just anybody, so it was really, really important that I felt the connection and I liked the person on the other side of the table.”
Black said Rundle sees “huge potential” to apply what he and Rundle’s other investors have learned at other tech companies to help Iris Booth grow to another level.
When asked about Iris Booth’s limitations given the human touch that characterizes many types of photography, and the potential for the company’s tech to replace the work of photographers, Siri noted that the startup is “not trying to replace every photographer.”
“We don’t do family photos, we don’t do glamour shots, we don’t do sports, we don’t do craft, we don’t do anything except one thing: we take the perfect headshot, every time,” Siri said. “There’s lots of places we don’t belong, and there’s lots of arenas that we don’t compete in,” she continued. “We’re very clear and very focused on what our intention is, and I think that’s what helped drive success.”
Feature image courtesy Iris Booth.