Inovia Quarterly: Luxury Retreats x Airbnb, Series C: Top Hat & WorkFusion, AI Disruptors — Clearpath & Ross Intelligence

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This first quarter was rich in milestones for Inovia companies! Airbnb acquired Luxury Retreats in its biggest acquisition yet as the apartment-rental website takes steps toward becoming a full-service global travel company.

Top Hat closed its Series C round of funding led by Union Square Ventures to take over the $10Bn university textbook market.

Workfusion raised its Series C round led by Georgian Partners to scale AI-powered automation in enterprise processes.

If you’re part of the Inovia limited partners’ community, save the date for our Annual Summit in Toronto on June 13–14th.

Happy reading and thank you for being part of our story!
The Inovia Team

IN THE NEWS

• Airbnb acquires Luxury Retreats, beating out Expedia, Accor | Bloomberg
• Impressive advances in AI are disrupting the legal industry. Ross developing legal memo service | New York Times
• Top Hat raises $22.5 million Series C to go after Pearson, McGraw-Hill 📚 | Bloomberg Technology
• 40 Woman in Canadian Tech Worth Following, our very own Sarah Marion is included 🏆 | Betakit
• Allocadia expands its leadership team with the hiring of Barrett Foster as CRO | Marketwire
• LinkedIn CMO Shannon Stubo joins Vidyard’s Board of Directors | Betakit
• Interview with Thalmic Labs CEO Stephen Lake outlining why Amazon and Intel are betting on the startup | Business Insider
• Clearpath CEO, Matt Rendall on the Rise of the Robots 🤖 | Flux Podcast
• OTTO Motors, a division of Clearpath Robotics, is named a Top Robotics Company in 2017 by Robotics Business Review 🏆 | OTTO Motors
• WorkFusion Raises $35 Million to Scale AI-powered Automation within Enterprise Operations | PR Newswire
• Routehappy partners with Airbus to take airline product differentiation to new heights ✈️ | Apex

THOUGHTS

• Shawn welcomes Scott Munro and Todd Simpson to our Silicon Valley team! | Inovia blog
• Chris shares his Thoughts on what does it take to get to a successful exit — The Luxury Retreats story | Inovia blog
• Shawn reflects on Top Hat’s Series C announcement in TopHat: 25x in 5 years… how did that happen? | Inovia blog
• Dan Freedman’s Growth Hacking Tip #778: Make The Big Sale by Managing Your Customer’s Career Risk | Inovia blog
• Hugues invites founders to Embrace the fear (or SaaS best practices) and move forward | Inovia blog
• Scott Munro, our M&A Advisor explains Exit Preparedness for Venture-backed Startups | Inovia blog

INDUSTRY HEADLINES

• Inovia’s Sarah Marion discusses the impact of Snap’s IPO on Canada’s Tech IPO Market | Bloomberg TV
• Recommended read from Chris: Index of Best AI/Machine Learning Resources | Hackernoon
• Trudeau’s plan to lure Silicon Valley investors to Canada | CNBC
• CVCA’s 2016 VC Year in Review | CVCA

UPCOMING EVENTS

• May 9–11th: Gainsight is hosting its Customer Success event Pulse in San Francisco. Allocadia, Vidyard, Poka and other SaaS portfolio companies will attend. Connect with Antoine at the event.
• May 24th: CMO Dinner in Montreal in conjunction with C2 Montreal. If you’re a CMO in the Inovia Family, check your inbox for an invite. Seats limited.
• May 24–26th: Inovia is partnering with C2 and Bloomberg Technology to curate the C2 x AccelerateMTL program within the C2 conference. Antoine will be speaking alongside 20 VCs, startup founders and operators yet to be announced.
• June 6–8th: Invest Canada ’17 in Montreal will bring LPs from all over Canada and the US. Chris will be speaking.
• June 13–14th: Inovia is hosting its annual summit with LPs and CEOs in Toronto, looking forward to seeing many of you!
• June 20–21st: C100’s 48Hrs in the Valley. Meet up with Sarah who’ll be at the event.

FUNDING

We’ve included all disclosed fundings of portfolio companies in Q1–2017 (excluding pre-seed investments). The lead gets a🏅.

• Top Hat: US$22M from Union Square Ventures 🏅, Inovia Capital, Georgian Partners, Golden Venture Partners, VersionOne Ventures, SoftTechVC, Emergence Capital Partners. Read more on the Inovia blog
• Workfusion: US$35M from Georgian Partners 🏅, Inovia Capital, Mohr Davidow Partners, Nokia Growth Partners, Greycroft, RTP Ventures. Read more on Yahoo