While Telus Corp. (TSX:T) has long served as a stalwart of the B.C. tech sector and Vancouver firms like Hootsuite Inc. gained significant notice when social media began exploding a decade-plus ago, a new breed of innovative companies has been capturing the attention of the industry in recent years. Significant capital has been pouring into the West Coast as of late, pushing many businesses into anchor-company status. BIV talks to five of the most notable leaders emerging now.
Jack Newton, CEO, Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.)
It was a blog post detailing legal-technology provider Clio’s business model that caught the eye of a potential investor who emailed the Burnaby company best known for providing management tools to law firms to help them reduce costs.
The legal-tech firm had been having difficulty getting investors on board, and the eager message was left sitting in the spam folder for two weeks before a second message finally surfaced, helping Clio on its growth path.
Interest from investors hasn’t let up since then, with Clio revealing last month the close of a US$110 million investment that raised its valuation to US$1.6 billion.
“We’ve seen a huge acceleration in the adoption of technology in law firms that have traditionally been viewed, maybe, as one of the slower adopters of technology,” said CEO Jack Newton. “What COVID-19 has really done is it’s driven 10 years of acceleration and digital transformation in the legal industry over the course of 10 months.”
Clio is looking to make some strategic acquisitions in the near future as well as add another 250 people to its roster by the end of the year. Newton expects the company will be up to more than 1,000 employees within 12 months as it hires additional remote workers while boosting offices in B.C., Alberta, Ontario and the Republic of Ireland.
“We realize that technology is not just a tool that can improve the experience for the privileged few that can access legal services today,” Newton said. “We believe that automation and technology can help law firms run more efficiently, thereby further reducing the cost of legal services.”
Greg Smith, CEO, Thinkific Labs Inc.
Before Thinkific’s (TSX:THNC) initial public offering back in April, co-founder Greg Smith got his start in the IPO game 15 years ago when he was a summer student at a law firm, drafting documents and performing due diligence.
“I remember being super excited to be just a small part of it then,” said Smith, whose company’s platform helps businesses and individuals create and distribute online courses.
With the pandemic keeping the global population in their homes, adoption of online courses exploded. Meanwhile, Smith said jurisdictions such as Australia and New Zealand, where COVID-19 has been contained significantly, are still experiencing growth.
This year’s IPO raised $160 million and pushed Thinkific to a $1 billion valuation.
“The opportunity that we’re facing is massive, and there’s so many people we want to help to build a business or take their existing business and scale it by creating courses and taking what they know and educating others,” Smith said.
“We feel like we’re just getting started, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s capable in online courses, and memberships and entrepreneurial ventures in online education.”
The Vancouver-based company is in the midst of hiring 200 more workers by year’s end to bring its headcount to 500 people.
Anna Sainsbury, chairwoman, GeoComply Solutions Inc.
GeoComply launched in Las Vegas in 2011 before co-founder Anna Sainsbury moved the cybersecurity firm to her hometown of Vancouver a few years later. The company specializes in detecting whether online users of streaming services or online gambling websites are trying to mask their locations using means such as virtual private networks.
Growth had been steady as more streaming services were tapping GeoComply to help crack down on, for example, Canadians trying to access British streaming platforms to view shows not licensed in Canada.
But it wasn’t until 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), that Sainsbury knew GeoComply’s technology was about to explode. The PASPA ruling allowed U.S. states to legalize betting on sports – and to ensure bets are being placed within proper jurisdictions.
“When we set out to build this geolocation compliance product, it was really for a very niche market,” she said. “We’re just so fortunate that both the initial niche market grew, but also the use cases across other large sectors grew as well.”
By March 2021, institutional investors had taken enough notice to deliver an undisclosed investment that Sainsbury told BIV propelled GeoComply to “unicorn” status, referring to companies valued at $1 billion or more.
Hamed Shahbazi, CEO, Well Health Technologies Corp.
After selling TIO Networks to PayPal Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:PYPL) for $300 million in 2017, fintech founder and CEO Hamed Shahbazi felt it was time to circle back to one of his long-standing interests: health care.
“Digitization, and digital technologies and modernization of the field was really lagging,” Shahbazi said, recalling one visit to the doctor in which he realized physical paper still dominated even when other businesses had long shifted to digital records.
He now leads Vancouver-based Well Health Technologies (TSX:WELL), which has amassed a portfolio of health clinics across North America, operates an electronic medical records division and offers other services that assist doctors, such as billing and telehealth platforms.
Shahbazi said the company has made 20-plus acquisitions over the past few years with the intent of offering services to medical practitioners typically accustomed to navigating a fragmented market for digital technologies within health care.
Since the pandemic, the company’s shares have more than doubled as practitioners have been forced to rapidly accelerate their adoption of digital technologies in medical clinics.
“It’s really attractive to be in an industry like that. You feel an enormous sense of satisfaction when you get anything done – probably for that reason it’s a very hard industry,” Shahbazi said.
Carl Hansen, CEO, AbCellera Biologics Inc.
A physics and astronomy professor by trade, Hansen now leads one of Canada’s most successful biotech firms following AbCellera’s (Nasdaq:ABCL) blockbuster US$555 million initial public offering in December 2020.
The company is best known for partnering with Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE:LLY) on a COVID-19 treatment. The American pharmaceutical giant tapped the Vancouver company’s platform to zero in on antibodies generated in a natural immune response to the novel coronavirus.
With fresh capital in hand from the IPO, AbCellera is building a 380,000-square-foot campus in Vancouver.
The labs have been custom-designed to bring together research that cuts across biology, software development and machine learning, and Hansen said one of the company’s top priorities is recruiting talent throughout different disciplines.
“Historically they’ve [local university grads] had to seek those opportunities south of the border,” Hansen he told BIV.
“That’s one of the reasons it is so important to have these facilities here in Vancouver.”
