Rubikloud is adding another 60 people to its Toronto office.
The news comes just over a month after Rubikloud raised a $46 million Series B from Intel, iNovia Capital, and OTEAF. Rubikloud is in the business of helping retailers migrate legacy data onto the cloud, and using that data to automate decision-making on promotions across stores, loyalty marketing, and mass promotional planning. With Intel as the lead, the hope was to leverage its sensor-level data to get more insight on what’s happening in stores in real-time.
“The core tech scene in the city is not large scale enterprise deployments. We’re excited about being that company here.”
– Kerry Liu
“The state of the enterprise AI market is nascent, with few companies deploying AI solutions to businesses,” said Kerry Liu, CEO of Rubikloud. “Rubikloud’s product and platform are ahead of the market, offering tech talent practical AI careers where they can actually build AI applications. We’ve seen a recruiting upticks as analysts and shareholders actively ask companies how they are using AI and ML to improve their bottom lines. Our clients are not funding research projects. They are funding automated production systems.”
The company is adding junior to senior executive positions in data science, engineering, sales, operations, finance, and marketing to meet the demand for its growing customer base. In an interview with BetaKit following Rubikloud’s Series B, Liu indicated that a big part of the funding would go to meeting this demand, as the company is dealing with large volumes of data.
“We have more committed customers than we can deploy — a lot of them happen to be in Europe and Asia,” said Liu at the time. “A big part of this is expansion or deployment and delivery. And we have a one to two-year window to exponentially explode as a company.”
The company said it is hoping to launch offices in London and Hong Kong. Since launching in 2013, Rubikloud has grown to more than 75 employees today, and signed on partners like A.S. Watson Group, Asia and Europe’s largest health and beauty retailer. In a BetaKit profile a year ago, Liu had plans to grow to 100 by the end of that year, and his excitement at growing an enterprise SaaS company from Toronto.
“The core tech scene in the city is not large scale enterprise deployments,” said Liu, who says the city has had a rich history of winning this industry in companies like D2L and Quickplay Media. “We’re excited about being that company in Canada here, and if you’re interested in hundred-terabyte levels of data, deployed at very large companies and all of the business processes around multimillion-dollar software-as a-service sales, we want to be a home for that in Toronto.”