While Shopify’s IPO was one of the biggest Canadian tech stories of the year, John Ruffolo, CEO of OMERS Ventures, isn’t as optimistic for 2016.
In a report from Bloomberg, Ruffolo said that amid turmoil in North American markets and bigger names taking more time to prepare for a share sale, Canadian tech IPOs are set for a slowdown.
“The only thing that you can control is an IPO,” Ruffolo said. “What we can do is we try to make sure the companies are well-positioned, have the right talent, their operating model is very tight so they’re fully prepared to go public.”
Ruffolo predicted that Hootsuite and D2L will wait until 2017 before they IPO, and expected that only one of 26 companies in the OMERS Ventures portfolio would go public in 2016. Though he declined to say which one, Bloomberg noted that Vision Critical is the likely contender as it’s already hired the Bank of Montreal to prepare for a stock sale.
