Two Toronto startups have announced fresh funding rounds to fuel their growth. Here’s the latest on who raised how much, and from whom.
Cinchy raises $3 million
Toronto-based Cinchy, which is building an enterprise data collaboration platform, has raised $3 million in funding.
The funding was led by Blindspot, with participation from ScaleUp Ventures, MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF), Techstars, and BDC Capital.
Cinchy’s platform enables multiple systems and users to collaborate on data in real-time, without requiring separate application databases. The goal is to help enterprises save time and money by avoiding complex integration work typically required to share data across systems, including APIs.
“Today, data is fragmented across thousands of application databases. As a result, organizations need to perform complex integration work as part of every project to share data across systems. This is inefficient, insecure, expensive, and blocks every organization’s ability to innovate quickly,” says Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy. “We created Cinchy to unlock unprecedented agility for our customers, and we are 100 percent committed to enabling them to out-innovate their competition.”
TD Bank was one of the company’s early customers. “As we continue to build the bank of the future, we are always looking at new technologies like Cinchy that contribute to operational efficiencies and help us power new experiences for our customers,” said Tim Clark, CIO of Canadian retail banking, enterprise information management and customer assistance at TD.
“If data is as valuable as people now believe, then the world is in dire need of a platform that finally respects it. We believe all data must be secure, seamlessly connected, and immediately accessible to those who need it,” said Karanjot Jaswal, CTO of Cinchy. “Not everyone gets it, but savvy executives have lost patience investing in new technologies based on future hypothetical benefits. We specifically designed Cinchy to enable immediate ROI while incrementally evolving towards a single secure network of interconnected data.”
TwentyBN raises $13 million CAD Series A
TwentyBN, which has offices in Berlin and Toronto, has raised a $13 million CAD ($10 million USD) Series A.
The funding was led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, with participation from Coparion, Creative Edge, and MFV Partners. TwentyBN’s system enables AI to understand human behaviour, surroundings, and the full context of engagement. To date, the company has offerings in touchless sensing, scene understanding, and context-aware human-computer interaction. With TwentyBN solutions, any camera-equipped device from smartphones to robots can understand physical surroundings and decipher human behavior to increase safety, productivity, and comfort for people.
“From day one, we’ve been committed to pushing decades of progress in AI and interactive computer vision into every corner of the world, be it the home, office, store or a robot’s brain,” said Roland Memisevic, CEO and chief scientist of TwentyBN.
The company plans to use the funding to scale its business. It’s also active in the AI research space through its partnership with MILA in Montreal, and it’s released two large-scale video datasets and baseline code to the public for academic purposes, and licensed technology and data to research labs and corporations.