Two Canadian SaaS companies raised funding for their next stage of growth this week. Here’s the latest on who raised how much, and from whom.
Zensurance raises $1 million seed round
Toronto-based Zensurance raised $1 million in seed funding in a round led by Ferst Capital Partners.
The company plans to use the funding to hire new talent and expand its platform, which provides curated insurance packages to small businesses. Portag3 and Ryerson Futures also participated in the round.
“Most small business owners have to fill out and fax 10-page forms, wait weeks, and pay by cheque to get insurance. We are very excited to bring transparency and digitization to such an important industry,” said Danish Yusuf, CEO of Zensurance.
“We see an enormous opportunity to re-imagine the way in which insurance is distributed to businesses by leveraging technology. Yet innovation in the commercial insurance industry, until now, has been largely unaddressed in Canada,” said Dominique Ferst, Managing Partner at Ferst Capital Partners. “The founding team at Zensurance has the experience, vision and customer focus to address and take a leading role in this transformation and Ferst Capital Partners is thrilled to be part of their journey.”
In October, Zensurance won $25,000 at Ryerson University’s Next Big Idea in FinTech competition.
FileFacets raises $4 million Series A
Ottawa-based FileFacets has closed a $4 million Series A in a round led by Celtic House Venture Partners.
FileFacets’ platform allows its organizations to move disorganized files from shared drives to enterprise content management systems (ECMs). FileFacets uses cloud data analytics to make it easier for businesses migrating data by automating the categorization of data, the attribution of file metadata, and the migration of unstructured content from multiple sources into structured ECMs.
FileFacets plans to use the funding to expand its sales and marketing team in North America and accelerate the growth of its channel sales strategy. Wesley Clover International and GCI Ventures also participated in the round.
“FileFacets has done an amazing job building their technology platform to deliver a single, turn-key solution to help solve a major piece in the data migration puzzle,” said David Adderley, partner at Celtic House Venture Partners. “We look forward to working with Chris and his team on their continued growth and success. We expect FileFacets to take advantage of synergies with Celtic House’s existing portfolio of companies by leveraging their business and technology expertise and customer relationships.”
FileFacets was accepted into the L-SPARK accelerator’s fall 2016 cohort.
“We are delighted to have received this funding that will allow us to focus on scaling our operations across North America and into markets abroad,” said Chris Perram, FileFacets co-founder and CEO. “We will continue our mission of making it cheaper, faster, easier and more secure for organizations to move data from disparate sources into ECMs.”