Luge Capital Newsletter

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Luge Capital

5 min readApr 16, 2019

With a running start this year, the momentum keeps building. We were very active in Q1 across Canada and the US with a new investment announcement, a new team member addition and lots of collaboration in the industry. Here are some highlights.

Welcome Ramin

Ramin Wright joined the Luge investment team in our Toronto office. As a former lawyer from Osler in New York, a Shark Tank dealmaker and a 2x entrepreneur, he comes with a wealth of experience, and adds further depth to the team. Read more about Ramin’s background in his blog post.

Insurtech Finaeo Funding

Luge led a $5.35M investment in Finaeo, a Toronto-based insurtech startup that we believe will change the insurance experience for advisors, their clients and carriers alike. We were joined by RGAX, Rising Tide Fund, inovia capital and existing investors Alex Norman of AngelList, Impression Ventures and iGan Partners. To learn more on how Finaeo will transform the insurance industry, please read the press release and our blog post.

Flinks

Flinks recently launched the Flinks Score which is a data enhancement engine that analyzes customer financial transactions and behavioural patterns to gather actionable insights so financial institutions can make better credit decisions. Categorizing and making sense of live transactional data at every stage of the business process has resulted in increased lending volume while significantly reducing loan default rates for Flinks Score customers.

Flinks also powers hundreds of fintechs with their account verification and data aggregation product line. For more info, visit the Flinks website.

Open Banking

The proposed open banking framework has meaningful impact across financial services for consumers, fintechs, and large institutions. Read our perspective on open banking, which we shared with the Canadian Department of Finance and the Canadian Senate Committee for Banking, Trade and Commerce.

Advisory Roles

Karim joined the Ontario Securities Commission’s (OSC) Fintech Advisory Committee (FAC). The FAC advises OSC staff on developments in the fintech space, as well as the unique challenges encountered by innovative businesses in the securities industry. Learn more about the FAC and see the committee members here.

Karim also joined Village Capital’s Advisory Board, which is made up of fintech investors, founders, financial institutions, and other sector experts. The board seeks to offer solutions to the most pressing issues in financial services.

Events

Below are some of the events that we attended in Q1. Follow us on Twitter to see which conferences we are attending, and come say hello in person.

CFA Fintech Rendez-vous (Montreal): David spoke about the Canadian Fintech Landscape to financial professionals. View the presentation here.
Venture Summit West (San Francisco): Karim was a panelist in the Banking On Fin-Tech Innovation discussion and judged the pitch contest.
Rotman Risk Management and Financial Innovation Conference (Mont Tremblant): David discussed how AI and Data Analytics are changing financial services with fellow panelists and presented industry use cases.
BDO VC Pitch Day (Montreal): Laviva was on the panel of judges providing feedback to the rising tech startups. You can read more about it here.
Empire FinTech Conference (NYC): David was surrounded by innovators at the conference, from startup entrepreneurs to investors and decision makers in fintech ecosystem.

Upcoming: InsurTech North (Toronto) is taking place May 23 to 25 — contact us if you’d like to attend and get a discount on your tickets.

Marvin on the Rock

In a charity fundraiser, David sang two songs by Queen alongside Marie-Claude Girard (CDPQ), Jacques Perreault (BrightSpark), Jean-François Pariseau (Amplitude VC), Charles Morand (CDPQ) and Nathalie Faubert (Univalor). All together the evening raised close to $350,000 for the Marie-Vincent Foundation!

Portfolio Perks

Our portfolio companies can benefit from numerous perks to help drive their business, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, InVision App, SendGrid, Vidyard, Mercer, etc. Contact us to learn more.

Ideas Lead to Innovation

We are passionate about the fintech space and are fortunate to see incredible solutions being developed everyday by creative and determined visionaries. Like these entrepreneurs, we also have ideas about what the world needs, based on our analysis, industry insights, and interests. We have published a handful of ideas that we believe are exciting. Take a look.

We Believe in Partnerships

Building and maintaining win- win partnerships are a core part of our values. We partner with the startups, guiding and assisting them as their needs arise. We collaborate with major financial institutions and large tech companies to understand their pain points and long-term strategies to uncover solutions that align with their business needs. We meet regularly with our partners who have shared over a hundred problem use cases, their project roadmaps and powerful data sets for AI powered startups to build on.

David recently joined as a mentor in Desjardins’ new Startup in Residence program, which has as a goal to match promising startups with great industry use cases.

We hope you will take time to enjoy some sunny spring weather with your teams and loved ones during this time of year!

Luge Capital Team