The Beginning of a New Era in Our Relationship with Smooch
Today, Inovia Capital is thrilled to congratulate Smooch and its impressive team on joining Zendesk. In August 2016, Smooch announced its seed financing and we shared why we were investing in the company. Core to our thesis was the idea of cross-platform conversational interoperability — helping businesses to engage with consumers across multiple channels (including email, phone, chat, and social media) while retaining data across sessions. Smooch stood out for its capacity to fully inform every touchpoint with a customer, and today Zendesk is gaining a valuable partner, who will help them maximize the consumer experience through advanced datasets. We are excited that Smooch has a chance to accelerate its journey towards delivering a more human customer experience, at scale.
The best acquisitions preserve the acquired company’s mission, drive, and relationships. Companies are built by people, and the businesses that have multiplied value through acquisitions do so by integrating and empowering their new team members. We’ve been fortunate to know Hamnett Hill, co-founder of Smooch, and Warren Levitan, Smooch’s current CEO, for over a decade, watching them build their last company Radialpoint into one of Montreal’s tech leaders, before joining another Inovia portfolio company, AppDirect through an acquisition. Throughout Warren’s time at AppDirect, he remained a close friend and leader we respected. While learning more about Smooch’s mission, we got the chance to know Mike Gozzo, Smooch’s other co-founder and CTO — a thoughtful product leader, skilled technologist and valuable collaborator within the Inovia community of CTOs. His work has helped grow conversational experiences from a niche idea to a driving principle of support, sales, and marketing.
Over the past decade, many of the entrepreneurs that Inovia has backed have seen their companies acquired by industry leaders and gone on to join these teams. These new partnerships have helped our portfolio founders grow into even more formidable entrepreneurs, and have introduced Inovia to a new class of entrepreneurs and advisors that have helped build us into an even stronger organization. Here are a few examples:
In 2012, Google acquired Bufferbox, a shipping company that leveraged publicly-accessible lockers. The founding team joined Google, further honed their love of hardware and moonshots in Google X, and left to drive even more impact in their second ventures — Mike McCauley is now the co-founder and General Partner of Garage Capital, Aditya Bali is CCO of another startup, KitchenMate, and Jay Shah is the Director of the University of Waterloo’s Velocity, the program that initially incubated Bufferbox before the entered YC. Inovia now benefits from Google’s former CFO Patrick Pichette’s expertise as one of our newest General Partners.
Later that year, Airbnb acquired Localmind, a social network connecting inquisitive travelers to locals. Four years later, Airbnb acquired another Inovia portfolio company, Luxury Retreats. Its team and luxury listings now power Beyond by Airbnb and Airbnb Plus with Luxury Retreats’ CEO Joe Poulin at the helm. We continue to invest in the travel and hospitality space, and Joe remains a trusted co-investor and advisor to Inovia. It’s also great to have Laurence Tosi, Airbnb’s former CFO, joining Inovia at our CEO Summit this year alongside two of the travel entrepreneurs that we’ve backed to discuss our future of travel thesis.
Similarly, we first met Return Magic’s co-founder and CTO Raff Paquin during his time at Lightspeed POS, a current Inovia portfolio company, which recently went public — becoming Canada’s second largest technology IPO. Raff helped launch Interaction Ventures, an angel fund supporting entrepreneurs building the future of commerce, alongside Guillaume Racine, his Return Magic co-founder, and LP Maurice, co-founder, and CEO of Busbud (an Inovia portfolio company). We learned where they saw pain points in e-commerce while investing alongside them, and invested in Return Magic, which Shopify ultimately acquired in 2018. Raff and Guillaume continue to be advisors and investors in Inovia as we further invest in the future of retail.
We can go on and on. Acquisition transactions that saw the great young and dynamic founders we backed early on, join the ranks of great companies such as Intel, Disney, APTCO, ServiceNow, McKesson, Nielsen, and others, providing them and us with new insights and relationships. At Inovia, we count the relationships we build as the most important work that we do. When we back an entrepreneur, we do so because we see in them the possibility of changing the world. The title and the company context are second to that, and so we are excited and eager to support them in contexts outside of their initial company. An acquisition isn’t the end of a conversation, but rather a springboard for many new conversations. We’re very excited to watch Warren, Mike, Pascal and the team lead from within Zendesk, and for the new relationships within Zendesk that will emerge from this new chapter in Smooch’s journey.
Congratulations!
