Montreal-headquartered financier Inovia Capital has added two different CTOs in as many weeks—bringing on Steven Woods, former Google Canada lead in Waterloo, Ont., as technology chief and ex-Abu Dhabi Investment Authority executive Krista Skalde as talent chief. 

The hires come as Inovia competes in and helps fuel Canada’s red-hot tech-financing market. This year, the firm closed a US$450-million second growth-stage fund, led mega-rounds for breakouts Snapcommerce and Symend, and joined ones for star turns AlayaCare, Bench, Hopper and Wealthsimple.  

Woods and Skalde join the latest phase of 44-person Inovia’s evolution from kick-starting early-stage startups to helping growth-stage firms scale up. Chris Arsenault, co-founder and partner, dated this era to an October 2017 Series D round for Montreal-based Lightspeed, which bought out Silicon Valley fund Accel. “Instead of selling the company short, we said, ‘We’re going to build something more massive,’” he said. 

Over the last four years, many more portfolio companies have found major markets for their products and started to scale in earnest. They need larger cheques, so Inovia raised its growth funds and brought in the former CFOs of Google and Research in Motion to helm them. 

The portfolio firms also need to upsize their sales and marketing functions, technology platforms and presences around the world. “We are not there to manage their operations,” said Arsenault. “We’re there to provide insights [and] coaching.” 

Skalde and Woods will be Inovia’s in-house masterclass hosts, consulting on talent and tech problems and proactively prompting companies to plan for scale-related issues ahead of time. Skalde will provide guidance on how to adapt a stock option-heavy compensation structure for the post-startup phase, or identify the kind of board members a firm should appoint early. Woods will help with establishing engineering systems and attracting technical talent. 

Inovia already has executives doing the same in other domains. Venture partner Dan Freedman helps investees scale sales and marketing, while head of corporate development Scott Munro runs a growing M&A advisory team. It’s engaged with about a third of Inovia’s portfolio, or just over a dozen companies. 

Inovia helped AlayaCare develop its due-diligence and post-M&A playbooks, and flagged potential risks on potential purchases, said Neil Grunberg, AlayaCare’s co-founder and vice-president of strategy and corporate development. “Our success in the deals we have completed and avoided have Scott and the Inovia team’s fingerprints all over [them].” AlayaCare has announced three acquisitions since 2020. Arsenault cited Lightspeed, Top Hat and AppDirect as other firms Inovia has advised on M&A.

Munro’s group is also counselling about two-thirds of the portfolio on the sell side, to be prepared in case of an offer. “So that when somebody knocks on your door because they want to acquire you, you have the option of taking that, but you can also decide to fundraise, or status quo,” said Arsenault. In its first decade from 2007 to 2017, the company had “a lot of exits in the early hundreds of millions of dollars,” he noted.

Woods and Skalde make 10 partners at Inovia, which has $1.5 billion in assets under management. The new hires will focus more on supporting portfolio companies and less on deal sourcing than investment partners, but share the same responsibility for decision-making and fundraising.  

In the market for financing providers, VC firms have to innovate themselves. Toronto’s Georgian Partners has built AI tools and an internal social platform for portfolio companies. New York-based Tiger Global is bringing its model of super-fast decisions and big cheques to the Canadian market. 

While Arsenault says Inovia’s growing support offering isn’t a reaction to competition, positive reviews from portfolio company founders like Grunberg are gold. “We want to remain that trusted partner.”