Funding Roundup: Knowtions, Intelistyle, You.i TV, Ario, Mobeewave, Logojoy, Trufan

As winter begins to take over the country, the funding deals for Canadian technology remained hot. Clearbanc picked up $70 million USD earlier this week while North received $24 million CAD from the Strategic Innovation Fund. Check out a collection of other funding rounds over the past week involving Canadian technology scale-ups.

Knowtions Research

Toronto-based Knowtions Research closed a $5 million Series A funding round led by Information Venture Partners. Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund also participated in the financing round for the AI company. Knowtions has created an AI platform that enables better use of health data to improve access to health insurance.

“We founded Knowtions to make the world’s health data useful,” said Anthony Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Knowtions. “In order to do that, we built our foundations in advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology because much of global health data is unstructured and messy. Unlocking these data points enables better predictions on human health and behaviour than ever before.”

Knowtions will use the funding to scale the delivery of their AI platform, Lydia, and to expand their team of data professionals by hiring machine learning scientists and platform engineers.

Intelistyle

Intelistyle raised $600,000 in seed funding led by Metavallon VC. Intelistyle is a London-based AI fashion platform operating out of Montreal’s Techstars AI hub. The company’s platform references fashion photography online and uses AI to determine pieces that look good together.

“What sets us apart is that our AI works with user-generated photography, constantly learns from the latest trends, and then tailors recommendations to each user’s body type, colours and personal style, offering a personalized omnichannel experience with the user’s own clothes or new,” said Kostas Koukoravas, Intelistyle co-founder. “We’re excited to work with Metavallon VC to develop our technology and expand our service globally.”

The funding round will be used to further product development and to expand the company’s services in European and American markets.

You.i tv

You.i TV, an Ottawa-based software startup has received CAD $30 million (USD $23 million) in growth capital led by Causeway Media Partners. You.i TV provides developers and organizations with software tools to streamline cross-platform app development.

“We’ve been on a mission since we started to help developers take control of the fragmented world we live in. Enabling them with the right tools lets them do what they do best – build experiences that matter to users,” said co-founder and CEO of You.i TV, Jason Flick. “This is just the beginning of shaping the future of all forms of media experiences. We are excited to have Causeway join the team with their well rounded expertise in this space as we reach new markets and build out the community.”

You.i TV will use the funds to expand their community globally and help the company completely rethink the advertising experience for their consumers.

Ario

Toronto digital lending company, Ario, has received a $10 million investment from Purpose Financial LP.

“The Ario digital-lending platform was developed to provide digital automated banking solutions for SMEs, a typically underserved segment of the North American financial market,” said Avinash Chidambaram, CEO of Ario. “We’re supporting incumbent financial firms, technology companies and non-financial firms to enable them to provide easy financing solutions and broader financial products to their clients.”

Ario will use the investment funds to expand their software services, adding cash management and card issuance capabilities for their enterprise customers.

Mobeewave

Montreal’s Mobeewave, the only provider of contactless mobile payment acceptance solutions that do not require external hardware, has closed a Series B funding round of CAD $21.7 million (US $16.5 million) led by NewAlpha Asset Management and Mastercard with participation from Forestay Capital.

“Securing strategic funding from organizations with a proven track record of supporting innovation, especially financial technologies, will enable Mobeewave to continue to grow, develop new product offerings and business partnerships,” said Maxime de Nanclas, co-founder and COO of Mobeewave. “This financial backing has also brought us one step closer to realizing our goal of making payment acceptance an option for everyone.”

The funding will promote Mobeewave’s growth and expansion strategy, expand the company’s employee base and support the payment platform deployment.

Logojoy

AI-powered design platform, Logojoy, has raised CAD $6 million (USD $4.6 million) in Series A funding led by Real Ventures with participation from Flybridge Capital.

“We estimate the SMB design market to be nearly $12 billion USD a year, with logo design representing about $1.5 billion,” said Logojoy’s co-founder and CEO, Dawsome Whitfield. “We’re excited that this funding will allow us to further our research into generative AI to create original design assets and graphics so that using Logojoy feels like working with a brilliant graphic designer.”

Logojoy will use the funding to grow its team, with a focus on hiring data scientists and developers.

“In the short-term, Logojoy will start showing users AI-designed fonts and symbols drawn with the deep learning models we’ve developed,” said Rares Crisan, co-founder and CTO of Logojoy. “Longer term, we plan to roll out this technology to all forms of business design, whether it’s an image for a display ad, a social media post, or a menu.”

Trufan

Vancouver SaaS company, Trufan, has raised CAD $500,000 from a group of angel investors including Kyle Kuzma, Davon Reed, Manny Padda, Michele Romanow, Andrew D’Souza, Jason Robins, Jake Ratner, Brian Poe Llamanzares, Eagle Rock Wealth Management, and Austin and Trevor Eastman.

Trufan provides a platform for brands to reward their top fans, using a proprietary algorithm to identify a user’s most engaged followers on social platforms. Trufan’s hope is to advance marketing capabilities for entrepreneurs and SMB’s in Canda.

“Many cities don’t do the best job of profiling some of the incredible companies that have been born on Canadian soil,” said Swish Goswami, co-founder of Trufan. “We want to let people know that it’s never been better to build a company in Canada.”