Toronto-based Reactiv, which provides an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered mobile commerce platform, has exited stealth with the announcement of a $5 million USD ($6.97 million CAD) seed round.
The round was led by Bonfire Ventures with backing from other American VC firms, including Foxe Capital, Anthemis Group, Daher Capital, and Alumni Ventures, co-founder and CEO Ross Correia revealed in a LinkedIn post. The new fundraise follows a previously unannounced $625,000 USD ($871,000 CAD) pre-seed round from undisclosed angel and institutional investors.
The pre-seed round closed in February and the seed round closed in July, with some undisclosed angel investors participating in both rounds, Correia told BetaKit in an email statement. Following the most recent round, Bonfire Ventures Principal Jennifer Richard will join Reactiv’s board.
“[We] truly wanted to keep our funding local, but the market here has shown a limited appetite for this space.”
Ross Correia
Reactiv
Reactiv offers ecommerce merchants a no-code mobile app builder with AI-powered customization elements, such as generating a mobile app from an existing website, as well as customer engagement and sale conversion features. Some of Reactiv’s customers currently include Campmor, Missouri Star Quilt Company, Top of the Mornin’ Coffee, and Canadian online perfume retailer FragranceBuy. Reactiv is available in the Shopify app store, and is priced at $499 per month with a premium $4,999 per month package that provides access to developer kits.
“Brands need only to update their website for new content for changes to be dynamically reflected on the mobile app,” Foxe Capital general partner Ruth Foxe Blader said in a blog post. “This value prop alone – that brands no longer need to have two sets of content updated on their website vs mobile app – is a huge time and cost saver for merchants.”
One of Reactiv’s standout features is Reactiv Clips, which the startup claims can create a fully functioning section of a client’s app within an advertisement or social media post without shoppers having to download anything. The Clip can then send push notifications to shoppers who clicked the post, no opt-in required, with the intention of converting a sale that may have been abandoned.
Founded in 2023 by Michael Pezzi, Vikash Jha, and Shopify alumni Correia and Zack Elias, Reactiv started as a bootstrapped team of 10 people. The startup was supported by Correria and Elias selling “every asset imaginable,” including cashing in their Shopify stock and maxing out their credit lines and cards, Correria described in a LinkedIn post.
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Since August 2023, the company has added 18 employees to its payroll and claims its waitlist reflects $1 million USD in annual recurring revenue, having generated $100,000 from it already. Correia told BetaKit the startup has another 10 “pencilled-in” hires.
Correia told BetaKit that the seed funding will be used to further Reactiv’s engineering efforts, bring Clips to market, and enhance its platform to support more AI-powered features and developer tools. Correia also made it clear that his startup is committed to building in Canada, believing “world-changing” companies can thrive in the country. Despite this belief, he noted the Canadian fundraising environment for an ecommerce company was challenging enough that he had to look south.
“We approached Canadian VCs first and truly wanted to keep our funding local, but the market here has shown a limited appetite for this space,” Correia said. “It feels like Canadian VC is often geared toward smaller, safer bets rather than big, ambitious plays.
“In contrast, our US partners shared our vision to swing for the fences and brought a depth of expertise in high-growth tech and commerce,” he added.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Reactiv.