While Silicon Valley and cities such as New York and LA continue to gain much of the media attention in the startup world, Canada is quickly becoming an innovation powerhouse. Over the past few decades, Canada has cultivated a startup culture with government-backed funding, incubators, tax incentives, and even special startup visas, which has resulted in a dramatic increase in tech startups and funding in the region.
The scene has reached a critical mass and many tech workers are flocking to the country from the U.S., China, and India (and especially Salesforce developers) to areas like the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, one of the top 20 startup ecosystems in the world. In fact, outside of Silicon Valley, Waterloo has the highest startup density of any area in the world. The recent success of tech companies such as Shopify has further bolstered Canada's position as a hub for start-up activity.
Salesforce Ventures has watched this innovative community grow firsthand. We have supported Canadian startups since 2011, with 7 investments in Canada including Vidyard. We have been witness to the momentum in the Canadian enterprise-startup ecosystem for some time, and now Salesforce Ventures is excited to announce our Canada Trailblazer Fund, a $100 million fund to invest in Canadian startups and fuel cloud innovation and customer success in the region. This fund will support entrepreneurs building companies on the Salesforce Platform and creating technologies to deliver unique capabilities to Salesforce customers.
Along with the fund, we're excited to announce our investments in these four great companies building innovative solutions leveraging the Salesforce Platform & technologies.
Tier1CRM is a leader in capital markets CRM, built on top of the Salesforce Platform. Tier1CRM’s solutions help its customers compete and service its clients more effectively through faster access to relevant information, improved communication, and higher levels of workflow automation. The CRM is favored by tens of thousands of users, from investment management and sales and trading to corporate and investment banking.
Traction Guest is a leading developer of cloud-based visitor-management systems that make hosting visitors effortless, memorable, and safe. Built on Heroku, the highly customizable Traction Guest platform enables global enterprises to leverage visitor data, shape their brand experience, and strengthen security. Its central administration and integrations with strategic business systems like Salesforce make this SaaS solution uniquely attractive to large, multi-location organizations.
Tulip is a mobile-application provider focused on empowering workers in retail stores. Partnered with Salesforce, Tulip integrates with Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to deliver simple-to-use apps for store associates to look up products, manage customer information, check out shoppers, and personalize the customer experience.
OSF Commerce is a leading global-commerce solutions company providing technology, consulting, implementation, and Online Shop Management services to emerging brands, premier brands, and retailers, specifically focused on building multi-cloud and unified commerce projects using Salesforce.
These four great companies represent the kinds of innovation we at Salesforce Ventures hope to find and cultivate through the Canada Trailblazer Fund. Canadian innovation will only grow as its ecosystem develops, and we look forward to helping startups grow their businesses in the Salesforce ecosystem. This is just the beginning of our commitment to Canada.
If you are an enterprise technology startup in Canada, we want to hear from you. Visit our website at https://www.salesforce.com/ca/company/ventures/ to share your details with us and remember to follow us on Twitter at @salesforceVC or LinkedIn for the latest.
Read more on Bloomberg and Globe & Mail
Originally appeared on: Medium
