Montréal-based startup Maxa has raised a $2.9 million CAD ($2.3 million USD) all-equity seed round led by York IE, an early-stage investment firm based in the United States (US).
Other investors in the round include Graphite Ventures and AQC Capital, as well as a number of strategic private investors, including serial entrepreneur Frederic Bastien, brought in through the Anges Québec network.
Founded in 2019 by brothers Alexis and Raphael Steinman, Maxa provides a data automation and artificial intelligence (AI) analytics software solution, working alongside enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms.
ERP refers to SaaS solutions that help manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, and supply chain operations, among others. Maxa claims that its customers typically see a two to 15 percent financial or performance increase after using its platform. Some of the companies that use Maxa include Bell and AJW, a services provider for aviation.
Maxa is not the only Canadian tech company looking to provide solutions for ERP providers. Shopify entered a partnership with a number of ERP providers last year to launch a centralized system that connects merchants’ platforms to key business data, such as inventory, products, orders, financial statements, and customer information.
According to Raphael, Maxa’s ERP platform sees a “strong appeal” with the manufacturing, distribution, and service sectors. He explained that this comes from a number of reasons, including that these sectors often generate a large number of transactional data, but struggle to hire in-house data science and tech staff.
“ERPs and core systems contain some of the highest quality data signals that a company owns,” Raphael said. “Still, most companies … struggle to embrace machine learning advances to help better monitor and forecast their business.”
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In July 2020, Maxa reached $50 billion in annual transactions analyzed through its platform. Last year, Maxa expanded its senior leadership team with the addition of Henri Trouillard as vice president of operations, as well as Iain Brown as vice president of business development.
Backed by new funding, Maxa said it intends to continue its product development efforts and bolster its North American go-to-market team. This latest investment brings Maxa’s total capital raised to over $4.8 million CAD ($3.8 million USD).
“We were able to keep our first funding rounds within a circle of private tech investors close to the founders,” he said. “Now that we have a strong track record with customers and have a repeatable sales motion, it’s time to kick it into high gear with the support of VC investors.”
Alexis told BetaKit that Maxa is also actively hiring Canadian and US sales staff, and will follow with a dedicated customer success team. “Given the current macroeconomic environment, we have been able to catch some great newly-available talent, locally and internationally,” he added.
Joe Rackza, co-founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer at York IE, said that the ERP space is “ripe for change.”
“Maxa has impressive technology to unlock critical intelligence from ERP systems. With a team with deep domain expertise and this market, we see tremendous opportunity,” said Rackza.
Featured image courtesy of Maxa.