As we neared the end of this year, The Logic asked subscribers for their thoughts on which tech leader(s) had the most successful 2021, and what expectations they have for the year to come.

Nearly 53 per cent of subscribers said Jean Lavigueur and Louis Têtu from Coveo had the most successful 2021, with the closing of a $215-million IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange; the second time they have taken a Quebec City-based company public.

Coveo makes AI search and customer-service tools for businesses. Since the pandemic hit, consumer spending and interactions have increasingly shifted online, Têtu told The Logic in November. “The inflection point in our business is [the] realization that personalization in digital is really an expectation.” 

Customers who are used to tailored recommendations and results on Wayfair, Amazon and Netflix are seeking similar levels of customization in other online interactions. “If you look at the history of Coveo, from 2012 to 2017, the majority of our customers were the tech companies in Silicon Valley—they were the early adopters,” said Têtu. “Now it’s become mainstream. A garage-door manufacturer in the Midwest the other day was talking to me about using AI to personalize the customer journey.” 

Current CTO Laurent Simoneau co-founded the company, initially named Copernic Technologies, in 1996. Têtu invested in the firm in 2008, becoming CEO in 2012 and bringing in Lavigueur and COO Guy Gauvin. The three executives had previously co-founded Taleo, a Quebec City-based talent-management software company, in 1999, taking it public in a US$66-million Nasdaq IPO in October 2005 before selling it to Oracle for US$1.9 billion in February 2012. 

Têtu is also on the boards of dépanneur giant Alimentation Couche-Tard and the Council of Canadian Innovators, a scale-up lobby group. He’s a prominent voice in Quebec’s AI community, and has called for Canadian governments to adopt strategies to help domestic firms retain talent, data and IP so they can continue to grow. 

Lavigueur is also a director of Vention, the Montreal-based maker of automated equipment. He’s “a great public-company CFO, one of the best I’ve ever worked with,” said Mark Shulgan, head of growth equity at OMERS, speaking at the SaaS North conference in Ottawa in November. “He runs a very tight ship.” The pension plan led a $227-million pre-IPO round for Coveo in November 2019.  

Quebec scale-ups Lightspeed and Nuvei both went public on the TSX before listing on a U.S. exchange. Last month, Shulgan suggested it’s “​​probably a little too early” for Coveo to follow suit, but the company could be in a position to do so in a year or two. Lavigueur told The Logic that the firm has “taken note” of Lightspeed’s and Nuvei’s successful dual listings, and while the firm is making “no commitments whatsoever,” it will “debate [the idea] at the board in a year or more.” 

The brothers Martin, Massi and Meti Basiri of ApplyBoard were runners-up to the Coveo executives, with 5.9 per cent of subscribers choosing them. The Kitchener, Ont.-based firm, which makes software for universities to manage international-student recruitment, raised $375 million at a $4-billion valuation in June. Andrew D’Souza and Michele Romanow of Toronto’s Clearco got 4.4 per cent of votes, after expanding the e-commerce finance giant into mergers and acquisitions and raising US$215 million, from investors including SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.

Dapper Labs’ Roham Gharegozlou, whose NBA Top Shot set the stage for NFTs’ breakout year, also got 4.4 per cent. So did Frederic Lalonde of Hopper, the Montreal-based firm that somewhat evaded COVID-19’s impact on the travel industry and raised over US$300 million in two rounds just a few months apart; and the ex-BlackBerry (Adam Belsher), ex-cop (Jad Saliba) duo closed a $115-million IPO for Magnet Forensics, the first public offering from a Kitchener-Waterloo company in 15 years and one of the few new Canadian listings to keep its stock above its opening price. 

Elsewhere, tech figures who received 2.9 per per cent of the vote: Rami Atallah, who’s established Ssense as a leader in luxury-fashion e-commerce, with a valuation topping US$4 billion amid backing from Sequoia Capital; Miranda Lievers and Greg Smith of Thinkific, a B.C. company at the intersection of the edtech boom and the creator economy, that went public in April with a billion-dollar valuation; and Raquel Urtasun, an AI star and former Uber researcher who launched Waabi in June with near-unprecedented big-name backing. And 1.5 per cent chose Embark’s Brandon Moak and Alex Rodrigues, who dropped out of UWaterloo, moved to San Francisco to launch the autonomous long-haul trucking startup, and took their now-multibillion-dollar company public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC in June.

Many subscribers also picked Coveo as the company they’d be watching most closely in 2022, with one respondent noting that “they’re now publicly traded and a bigger threat to competitors.” 

Other notice-worthy firms included perennial newsmakers Shopify, as well as Wealthsimple, the digital sports-media firm Playmaker and Dapper Labs. 

With the pandemic continuing to loom, subscribers predicted the rise of e-commerce will continue. 

“Probably a slow year for everybody in 2022 with the pandemic and its variants; however, digital companies in the e-commerce space such as Coveo or Ssense probably have the best shot at growth as most transactions are moving online,” one subscriber wrote.