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In 2006, Greg Smith, at the time an LSAT tutor, wanted to bring his teaching business online to reach more students. But it took a handful of different programs just to get the course up and running. The unwieldy experience led to an idea for a platform that would allow people to easily develop online courses on any topic—from hula-hooping to mining and manufacturing—and get paid.

Today, Vancouver-based Thinkific, which Smith co-founded in 2012, went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange at a valuation of about $1 billion. Its shares rose roughly 15.5 per cent, closing at $15.60.

The model: The company offers entrepreneurs a cloud-based software platform to create, host and market online courses. In exchange, Thinkific charges users a flat monthly fee. With the $160 million Thinkific aims to raise from its IPO, the company plans to expand its offerings for content creators to grow their businesses, including an app store that integrates the platform with services such as tax software, said Smith, the company’s CEO. Thinkific has about 300 employees, most of whom are based in Canada, and plans to use the IPO proceeds to expand its team, which works remotely, said Miranda Lievers, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer.

Sign of the times: Thinkific’s IPO comes as the pandemic fuels demand for online learning; revenue more than doubled last year to US$21.1 million. Thinkific also doubled its number of paying customers, with about half of the platform’s 50,000 content creators paying, on average, US$105 a month to use the service, according to Thinkific’s IPO prospectus. “COVID fundamentally drove the tailwinds that were already fueling the growth of our business,” Lievers said. Post-pandemic, Lievers said she expects demand for online educational services to remain strong. “Even when people are able to open their physical doors again, they’re not going to turn off online business models,” she said.

The ‘creator economy’: Similar platforms that serve content creators have fetched high valuations lately, as interest in the so-called creator economy shows no signs of slowing. Masterclass, whose website features instructional videos from experts, raised a new round of funding this month at a US$2.5 billion valuation, and content-monetization platform Patreon’s latest raise valued it at about US$4 billion. At the same time, however, investor interest in Canada’s tech IPOs had shown signs of losing steam, with Saskatoon’s Vendasta Technologies reportedly considering downsizing its planned offering due to lack of demand.