Canadian SaaS Companies Secured Over $1 Billion of Investments in 2017
L-SPARK has released its 2017 State of Canadian SaaS report, outlining a strong year of investments into software companies across the country.
The report found a few interesting bits of information and dives deep into what the SaaS landscape looks like in Canada. In total, $1.02 billion has been invested in Canadian SaaS companies so far in 2017, with that funding coming from countries as far as Norway, Japan and Israel. All figures are in CAD.
In terms of province specifics, Ontario dominated the deals, seeing $537.4 million over 56 deals. Quebec trailed behind with $254.3 million over 23 deals, and B.C. came third with $178.6 million over 11 deals. The rest of the provinces are broken down in the infographic below.
The most active investors into Canadian SaaS included some of the biggest names in venture capital. 500 Startups was involved in 18 deals, while BDC Capital and iNovia both had their hands in 10 each. Familiar faces like MaRS, Portag3 Ventures and OMERS Ventures rounded out the top six.
In terms of total Canadian SaaS deals, there was a nice round number of 100, with the average size coming in at $10.8 million. Two of the hottest industries—AI/chatbots and fintech—saw 14 and 13 total deals respectively, but they were both second to marketing and sales, which saw 16 total deals.
To break it down further, 30 of those 100 total deals were for less than $1 million, 42 were for totals between $1 and $10 million, and 14 were for totals between $10 and $50 million. These deals represent funding rounds from seed through Series C.
That leaves the behemoth deals worth more than $50 million. Huge names like Wealthsimple and Element.AI crack the list.
The nine mega-deals worth more than $50 million accounted for close to 60 per cent of the total SaaS cash investments in the country.
The report also takes a look at public SaaS companies in Canada. Huge names like Shopify and Kinaxis are familiar as publicly-traded companies, but there is also a reference to Real Matters, which set an IPO earlier this year valued at over $1 billion. Real Matters was also named as Canada’s most innovative company this year by CIX.
L-SPARK operates an Ottawa-based accelerator for enterprise SaaS companies and cloud startups to connect with experts and propel their revenues. Since 2015, the organization has accelerated 29 startups, which have raised over $11 million in funding to date. Read their full report here.
