The SaaS Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering major SaaS news from Canada and around the globe.
Subscribe to S|W using the form at the bottom of this page to ensure you don’t miss out on the most important SaaS news every week!
Canadian human resources startup Humi secures $31 million Series B (BETAKIT)
With a focus on providing HR tech specifically tailored to Canadian companies, Humi is looking to expand its platform’s capabilities and meet what it says is a rising demand for its solution.
Broadcom to buy VMware for $61B in record tech deal (BNN BLOOMBERG)
VMware shareholders can choose to receive either US$142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom stock for each VMware share, according to a statement on Thursday. The offer represents about a 44 per cent premium to VMware’s closing price on May 20, the last trading day before Bloomberg News reported the takeover talks.
LimaCharlie closes $7 million CAD to allow companies to manage, develop cybersecurity strategies (BETAKIT)
LimaCharlie provides security engineering teams with the tools and infrastructure to build and run their own security postures. To date, LimaCharlie’s growth has been achieved via word-of-mouth. Armed with fresh capital, the company has begun to ramp up its go-to-market efforts with the addition of its first sales and marketing employees.
Elon Musk will put up $6 billion to drop Tesla loans from his Twitter deal (THE VERGE)
After a brutal month for Tesla stock, Elon Musk will no longer fund his Twitter buyout by borrowing against his Tesla ownership stake. In an SEC filing, Musk announced the expiration of a series of margin loans against Tesla stock that were included in his original plan to buy Twitter. Meanwhile, Twitter shareholders have sued Musk over the chaotic acquisition, calling his bot gripes part of a scheme to negotiate a better price or kill the deal.
You’ve got a growing volume of data fragmented across your production database, CRM, ad platforms, and other tools.
To combine this data, most companies default to exporting CSVs, using vlookups, and asking engineers to pull data.
They needed a modern data stack.
There’s a better, more efficient way to manage and work with your data.
Modern data stacks give you all the data tools you need to easily centralize your data, organize, and prepare it for analysis.
Suddenly, you’re able to answer complex questions faster, create a universal source of truth, and empower all teams to make data-driven decisions.
Here’s everything you need to know about modern data stacks.
Led by former Shopify executive, on-demand delivery service Trexity raises $5 million for Canadian expansion (BETAKIT)
The capital will also enable Trexity to increase engagement in its current markets of Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, and Winnipeg, and to hire 10 to 15 employees over the next six months for its marketing, sales, and engineering teams. Currently, Trexity has 26 staff.
Monte Carlo raises $135M Series D at $1.6B price, showing that unicorn rounds are still a thing (TECHCRUNCH)
The round is an interesting echo of 2021‘s fundraising market, making our ears perk up when we caught wind of the capital event; how did a startup raise such a round in 2022, when the late-stage market is in the tank, valuations are under pressure, and growth more generally has lost some of its appeal as investors go after companies with greater profitability and cash flow stability?
The federal government wants to address Canada’s intellectual property woes, but is its strategy paying off? (BETAKIT)
While companies like Ranovus demonstrate how Canadian tech companies can scale through the development of IP, many stakeholders from the IP sector believe that most Canadian startups are not deriving value from their IP, which has put Canada behind its peers in the global race for IP rights.
Indonesia’s Zenius lays off 200+ employees (TECH IN ASIA)
Indonesian edtech Zenius is laying off over 200 employees amid the global economic downturn—more than 20 percent of its workforce. San Jose-based cloud security firm Lacework has followed suit, cutting 20 percent of its staff as part of an effort to restructure its business.
Unbounce expands leadership team with addition of Indochino, RBC Ventures, Mapbox alums (BETAKIT)
Housley brings over 20 years of C-Suite level experience at a variety of consumer brands to Unbounce, including Indochino, Milestones, Lavalife, and Hudson’s Bay. Meanwhile, Sieben comes to Unbounce after spending the last four years at RBC Ventures and Toronto-based, RBC-powered cashback application Ampli, while El-Hilo most recently worked as head of data platform at Washington location data firm Mapbox.
Sequoia Warns Founders of ‘Crucible Moment,’ Advises How to ‘Avoid the Death Spiral’ (THE INFORMATION)
Over the years, Sequoia, the venture firm behind Google, Apple and Airbnb, has developed a reputation as the tech industry’s Cassandra, through memos and presentations that it shared with the leaders of its portfolio companies during past macroeconomic crises. In 2008, that took the form of a 56-slide survival guide to the Great Recession, entitled “R.I.P. Good Times.” In early 2020, as the pandemic began upending the economy, Sequoia sent its founders a grim memo entitled, “Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020.”
Canadian innovators wonder what proposed SR&ED review will accomplish (BETAKIT)
Speaking over the phone with BetaKit, Munro noted the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program–better known as SR&ED–isn’t working, in his opinion. But he wasn’t convinced another review of the $4 billion annual program would fix things. After all, the SR&ED program has been tinkered with and reviewed almost constantly since it was first established in 1944.
Technology used by educators in abrupt switch to online school shared kids’ personal information, investigation shows (THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
Millions of students in Canada and around the world had their personal information sent to advertisers and data brokers when governments made an abrupt switch to online learning during the pandemic, according to a new report that reveals safety gaps in educational technology.
Dependbuild, Easy Platter, PragmaClin Research win collective $75,000 from Volta pitch contest (BETAKIT)
The winners beat out 7 other competitors at this year’s Volta Cohort Pitch Event, the first in-person edition of the contest since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. In the past, Volta usually selected five winners among the ten, opting this year to choose just three. A spokesperson for Volta told BetaKit that each competition awards up to five investments, noting that there is no guarantee that all five will be given out.
Substack Drops Fund-Raising Efforts as Market Sours (THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Amid an industrywide downturn, venture investors are preaching austerity and halting new deals, particularly for companies that have spent aggressively on growth.