Waterloo Tech Highlights for October 2024

Our goal is to provide you with a monthly primer on significant news events from private Waterloo-based technology companies in 5 minutes or less.


LoopX closed a seed round of approximately $1M.  Investors weren’t disclosed.

 

ApplyBoard received a $100M loan from RBCx to fund growth.  (Missed this from September.)

 

PathPresenter, a med-tech imaging startup raised a $7.5M round led by Avant Bio, Barco NV and Modi Ventures.  The CEO is Waterloo based so the NJ company will establish a presence in Waterloo.

 

Intellijoint had their largest US revenue month in history in October.

 

Intelliculture crossed the $1.5M ARR mark this month.

 

Shinydocs passed 2023 total revenue and new ARR at some point in Q3.

 

Skywatch announced a distribution deal with Maxar the world’s largest provider of commercial satellite imagery.

 

KA Imaging got one of their 3-D X-rays installed at the University of Greenwich, and another at Argonne National Labs.

 

Vena Medical released a new batch of MicroAngioscopes and plans to perform more cases in Ontario hospitals, changing lives here while waiting for US regulatory clearance.

 

Vidyard launched an integration with Salesloft as their preferred video partner.  As part of the deal Salesloft will sunset their competitive product.

 

eleven-x won a second deal with Toronto Parking for 40k off-street parking stalls.


Chris’ Thoughts


How do you get feedback?  The kind that cuts through insincere praise and fake reviews and provides a clear view of what’s going on.

 

Some industries have figured this out.  Take airlines for example.  By creating a highly transactional business, airlines tweak their algorithm every minute and strike a balance between profit and demand.  It’s enviable how they’ve turned air travel into the stock market – even if that’s the only thing to like about the business.  Contrast that with parking – another business that could be transactional but just isn’t.  If your parking lot pricing isn’t competitive, I suspect it will take many months before the lot owner figures it out and does something about it.

 

Often we don’t want to receive feedback – either personally or for our product.  Sometimes, that’s fair and a necessary part of “conviction” but sometimes it’s a blind spot.  I certainly don’t care what many people think about many things despite their assurance that I should.  As an investor I say “no” frequently, and most of the time, founders just don’t care to know the reason why.  That’s fair enough since a founder wants to surround herself with people who also believe.  I respect that.

 

But what about the many businesses that take the outsourced approach of annoying survey pop ups on their web site, thinking that makes them appear open to feedback.  I’m routinely amazed how infrequently software companies collect usage data, especially when it’s relatively easy to embed in the product.  And many who do collect data don’t do anything to analyze or operationalize it.  It seems that companies either collect data and use it to inform product development or they don’t do it at all and run web surveys instead.  Amazon and Netflix run tight feedback loops that drive their daily business operations.  At the other end of the spectrum, it seems like nobody working on Microsoft Teams or at Quickbooks wants to get feedback on how to improve their (terrible) products even though the data would be easy to obtain.  

 

It's a funny blind spot for many companies, especially in a world where it’s not nearly as hard as it was a decade ago to collect and analyze the data.  For all the optimizing and focus on better people, better culture, marketing automation, and more features, there’s a real gap around thoughtful feedback and instrumenting a business around it.    By now I expected that more companies would take a page from the playbooks of Uber, Spotify, and others mentioned here to build more functional feedback loops.


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Chris Wormald @cwormald