Ottawa-based startup Solink, which has developed software aimed to enhance business’ video surveillance capabilities, has closed a $23 million CAD Series B round. The funding brings Solink’s total raised to date to more than $40 million CAD.
“This next phase of our growth will allow us to integrate more data to help brick and mortar businesses innovate and scale.”
The round was led by OMERS Ventures. Previous investors Valor Equity Partners, ScaleUp Ventures, and the Business Development Bank of Canada, through its IT Venture Fund, also participated. Laura Lenz, partner at OMERS Ventures, will join Solink’s board of directors. Solink plans to use the new funding to “deepen its relationship” with existing customers and partners, and will also focus on “product expansion.”
“Our focus has always been on building a disciplined, high-growth business. We try to really focus on attracting the best talent, because we know we’ve got it,” Solink founder and CEO Mike Matta told BetaKit. “This isn’t just a sprint… we’ve got to go the distance. We think there’s a big opportunity in the market, and it’s good to get that validation externally from investors.”
Solink offers a video security solution for both small to medium-sized businesses and large enterprises. The company integrates existing security cameras with business data such as point-of-sale, alarm, and inventory, allowing cameras to be personalized for the day-to-day application in each customer’s business.
The startup’s technology also uses artificial intelligence in order to identify trends and flag suspicious behaviour proactively. It also allows customers to access individual events and quickly verify video recordings.
RELATED: Waterloo software startup launches encrypted video conferencing platform
Solink currently integrates with over 100 different data sources, such as point-of-sale software, and processes over 120 million transactions per month, or 700 hours of video per minute. Founded in 2009, the startup reports having over 5,500 customer sites and over 70,000 cameras across businesses in restaurant, retail, and financial services verticals. Over the last few years, Solink claims to have doubled its footprint each year.
“We really focused on the ability for our team to execute, and this has been something that our entire team is proud of.”
“Solink has the technology and the team to become a global success story far beyond where it is today,” said Lenz, who joined OMERS Ventures in November. “Mike and the team have built an impressive, high-growth, customer-focused business with exceptional product-market fit, and we are really looking forward to being a part of their success story.”
Matta claimed the Solink platform saw a 70 percent increase in “consumption” during the first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. Matta attributed this growth to business owners being forced to adopt new behaviours when managing their businesses remotely during the pandemic.
“The benefit of Solink is that it’s a platform for video, and you can start enabling applications to help modernize and automate some of the very manual processes that you’ve had in the business for a long time,” Matta noted.
RELATED: Fundthrough raises $24.6 million to support expansion
“Everyone needs a dashboard, they need a cockpit [to be] able to see what’s happening… the environment that we’ve built for collaboration and remote access has allowed people to do that really easily,” he added.
Over the course of the pandemic, Solink’s team has built a video alarm service, added new integrations for auditing social distancing, allowed remote temporary access for people that require on-site visits, and made it possible for customers to back up cameras to the cloud. The software also has new AI-enabled search capabilities that allow users to detect and count people and vehicles. Solink said these features were developed at no additional cost to customers.
Solink’s team currently sits at approximately 80 people, which Matta is hoping to grow to 120 by the end of the year.
“We really focused on the ability for our team to execute, and this has been something that our entire team is proud of,” the CEO said. “The accomplishments of the team really are a byproduct of the success, the fundraising, and the continued growth of the business.”
Image source Unsplash. Photo by Alex Knight.
