Kitchener-based Miovision Technologies announced today that it has completed a $30 million Series B round, led by MacKinnon, Bennett & Co., with additional funding from Investeco Capital, Renewal Funds, Plaza Ventures, and Comerica. The Series B round brings Miovision’s total funding to date to $35.75 million CAD; Investeco, Renewal Funds, MacKinnon are all notably follow-on investors.
Speaking with Miovision CEO, Kurtis McBride, it was clear the company was pleased not only with the amount, but as a milestone in the evolution of the company. Starting initially in 2011 as a traffic data collection resource for engineering firms and government agencies, Miovision has expanded its mandate to provide cloud-based traffic management for smart cities to improve traffic flow.
“We started out with a pretty niche product in the world of intersection data collection just to help traffic engineers,” McBride said. “But that got us exposed to a broader ecosystem of city infrastructure and network management, so we started building a product to frankly bring the transportation infrastructure world into the 21st Century.”
The process of modernizing systems that haven’t been improved since the 70s required Miovision to build a new product for the same buyers. “We’re basically going upstream, so rather than having to do offline engineering work, engineers can directly apply their decisions to the intersections from their desk,” McBride said.
While McBride admits the company didn’t necessarily know how it would “apply its solution to a bigger problem” beyond the initial push into market, he remained adamantly proud of Miovision’s ability to growth with its customers needs. “Innovation is in our blood,” he said. “We became a big fish in a little pond, and now we’re going to play in bigger ponds.” Already in 50 countries with over 500 customers, the ponds are going to get much bigger.
As an alumni of the Accelerator Centre, with a founding team of three University of Waterloo engineering graduates, McBride also seemed quite pleased that the majority of Miovision’s Series B funding came not only from follow-on investors, but Canadian investors. While Miovision would have pursued U.S. investment if it could not have found funding in Canada, McBride called the homegrown validation a “point of pride.”
“I think the general sense in Canada is that ‘there is no money and we need to go south.’ But I hope it sends a signal to other entrepreneurs in Canada that the money is out there – you just have to go look for it a little bit. I think, as Canadians, we’re guilty sometimes of not self-promoting as much as we maybe should. I think that applies to the venture world as well.”
McBride indicated it would use the money to staff up its sales team, as well as its engineering core, to ensure it can move cities with legacy infrastructure to the futuristic world of the cloud and IoT.